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)."

Comments

Have they addressed any of the weirdnesses?

[gowen]

Three things bug me about F95, which I use every day

1. No standardised/portable method for handling command line parameters.
   
2. Undefined behaviour for short-cutting logical ors. e.g. the behaviour of
   if(flag.and.function(var)) then...
   is undefined if flag is false and function() has side effects.
   
3. The things you *can't* use parameters for (like fixing lengths in format statements) without running fpp/cpp on the code first
   
4. No standardised meanings for

   real(kind=8) x

   Does that mean an 8 byte real? Or a 8 bit real? It depends on the compiler... (and yes, I know the portable solution is

   real (kind=kind(0.0d0)) x

   and the such like, but *thats* really ugly, compared to

   double precision x.

What sectors are people using this in?

[SLiK812]

When I was a young lad in college (all of 10 years ago), I had to learn Fortran for one of my Chem Eng classes. We were learning Fortran77, mostly cause my profressor didn't think we would need it in the future, and didn't want us to be concerned with some of the new structures in more current versions.

The Aero's also had to learn it (I know cause I taught it to them, since their prof sucked). So what sectors of industry are people working in with Fortran? Is it still just the Chemical and Aeronautical fields, are other places (where a different language might be more beneficial, say) still using it, cause no one wanted to convert systems?

Re:What sectors are people using this in?

[j_cavera]

The nuclear engineering communitiy is (still) standardized on F77. The reasons: 1) many great neutronics codes were written in the 60's (often for weapons research) using F77 and are still valuable today and 2) the NRC has some strange requirements concerning foward and backward compatability - almost anything from a DEC PDP-3 to a new G5 iMac can compile F77 code. Maybe someday they'll let us use F95...