Using Fortran - was RE: [ILUG] Commercial Fortran Compiler?

[Kevin Philp]

As a professional chemist myself I can say Fortran was the defacto standard 
for programming and we were all forced to use it, there was no option. But 
that was in the 70's/80's when we submitted Fortran programmes on punched 
cards to be run overnight on the VAX or PDP-11. With the increase in computer 
processing power most of us have more choice of what to use and can pick a 
language for reasons like "ease of use" and "nice gui" rather than bare 
number crunching ability. We switched to C++ simply because at the time the 
STL gave us powerful ways to manipulate complex arrays easily but languages 
have also tended to merge and copy each other and STL equivalents are 
available for a number of languages and lots of maths libraries are 
availlable for C++. So Fortran is not essential for chemistry...but if you 
like it...why not.

Kevin.


On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 11:55:32PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> On Monday 19 January 2004 14:21, kevin lyda wrote:
> > cue mail from people singing the praises of the stunning number of math
> > libraries for fortran.
>
> It's my impression that most maths projects at a research level -
> at least in subjects like cryptography and number theory -
> are written in C.
> The work in my dept on Lattice QCD all seems to be written in C
> for parallel computing.
> In fact I haven't seen anyone writing in Fortran for a long time.

Then you're not looking in the right department.

My father lectures in Chemistry and swears by Fortran.   To the extent
he takes the position that chemists can "write fortran programs in any
language".

Thomas