ForTran (aka ForTran) had its place in the history of this discipline. It bothers me personnaly to see so many negative comments from so many that should know better. C may be older than F'77 but it is young compared to Fortran.
In its age ForTran was used as a replacement for assembly language and found its way into use for writing almost every type of application imaginable: scientific codes, numeric codes, compilers, operating systems, system utilities, etc. The language is very old, and to trace it only to F'77 does not do it justice. For some of us, the introduction of F'77 was heresy, and we continued to code in F'66. But even F'66 was not the first standard ForTran. I remember coding in Fortran II, III and IV.
Coding by the rules almost guarunteed portability. Many widely distributed (free) numeric codes were written independent of word length: 32, 36, 48, 60, 64 bit lengths were all supported. But there were a few quirky implementations that required non-standard statements to be added.
Should one learn ForTran? Should one learn about history? If your interest is numeric or scientific computing than one should develop at least a reading knowledge of the language. As many have pointed out, there is a wealth of very good codes that exist written in ForTran. If it is your goal to re-invent the wheel, then ignore ForTran, if you want to leverage on top of the work of others, then learn the language.
It is fortunate that the languages in common use have progressed beyond ForTran -- but they are far from problem free. But the capability of our computers has far surpassed the systems on which ForTran was developed. [the first computer I programmed was an IBM 1620 with 20,000 digits of core memory, no disk, and a purely hollerith card based system -- try running your C programs on that beast].
So keep it in perspective. Use the tools that are most appropriate for the job at hand.
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ForTran (aka ForTran) had its place in the history of this discipline. It bothers me personnaly to see so many negative comments from so many that should know better. C may be older than F'77 but it is young compared to Fortran. In its age ForTran was used as a replacement for assembly language and found its way into use for writing almost every type of application imaginable: scientific codes, numeric codes, compilers, operating systems, system utilities, etc. The language is very old, and to trace it only to F'77 does not do it justice. For some of us, the introduction of F'77 was heresy, and we continued to code in F'66. But even F'66 was not the first standard ForTran. I remember coding in Fortran II, III and IV. Coding by the rules almost guarunteed portability. Many widely distributed (free) numeric codes were written independent of word length: 32, 36, 48, 60, 64 bit lengths were all supported. But there were a few quirky implementations that required non-standard statements to be added. Should one learn ForTran? Should one learn about history? If your interest is numeric or scientific computing than one should develop at least a reading knowledge of the language. As many have pointed out, there is a wealth of very good codes that exist written in ForTran. If it is your goal to re-invent the wheel, then ignore ForTran, if you want to leverage on top of the work of others, then learn the language. It is fortunate that the languages in common use have progressed beyond ForTran -- but they are far from problem free. But the capability of our computers has far surpassed the systems on which ForTran was developed. [the first computer I programmed was an IBM 1620 with 20,000 digits of core memory, no disk, and a purely hollerith card based system -- try running your C programs on that beast]. So keep it in perspective. Use the tools that are most appropriate for the job at hand.