Slashdot Mirror
FORTRAN 2003 Accepted as Standard
GraWil writes "Despite the nay sayers citing its death in 1965, the FORTRAN standards committee has now released the final FORTRAN 2003 specification. In an announcement to the comp.lang.fortran group, Michael Metcalf annouced that 'Fortran 2003 has passed its ballot with flying colours: 20 yeses, 0 noes, 8 abstains.' Strictly speaking, the 2003 and past standards are not freely available but drafts can be found online. FORTRAN 2003 is an upwardly-compatible extension of the current standard, FORTRAN 95, adding and extending support for exception handling, object-oriented programming, and improved interoperability with the C language. In other FORTRAN news, the GNU FORTRAN 95 compiler has made amazing progress over the past year. Gfortran will be part of gcc-4.0 when released (probably in 2005)."
Taking aside the idea of syntax for moment, this is a RT on 'what is a language' nothing to do with turin complete, OO or AOP or whatever.
/nets multiple compilers here, no no really this is a different point) and makes it a process.
What we really care about: libraries. Being able to do things quickly, without fsking about.
That is why php is successful, people can just run phpnuke/postnuke etc.
Perl is also successful because of its roots and flexibility, and easy to get into, and you could just run slashdot on your site if needs be.
What really helps these, is foundations. php/mysql, perl/whatdoesslashdotuse? People will write in anything if they see an easy way to get something done. Tutorials and support material.
The point - except for people studying 'computer languages' (as someone woudl study the history of world languages) who will pick up fortran as an option for a new language?
I am first to admit I do not know the dissadvantages or advantages of it. Are there any? or is it just syntax?
Java is a language, but much more, it abstracts the whole idea of a language ( no it isn't correct to cite
So it isn't about the clean syntax OO language, but the process of programming. Through design and development and testing, it has all be rbought up with testing, this is true of almost all languages, but when I think of Java I have a view of all the testing frameworks, libraries and standards.
To be honest, Fortran now is just a syntax specification, that says, take this line, and make that byte code. That doesn't do it for me.
One mans syntax is another mans syntax error.
Error on line 1: Insert ; to complete statement
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It seems you think of Fortran as a general purpose language, such as e.g. C and C++ it really is not. Fortran is strong at numerical computing, and in many areas there it is way better than C++.
You gave the answer. For scientific computing, Fortran is where the libraries and support tools are.
You can think of it as being for scientific computing what php is for web development. Except, of course, that Fortran is far more dominating in the scientific computing field than PHP is for web development.
I know, I write scientific computing in C++, and I must occationally consider if it wouldn't have been more cost efficient to use Fortran, where most of the relevant libraries, support tools and expertise is.