Fortran Matters
By Malcolm Cohen
April 15, 2004 —
(Page 1 of 3)
Fortran 2003, a bit of a misnomer perhaps, arrives in 2004. However, in a world dominated by Java, Visual Basic, C/C++ and C#, many of which have decent numerical computing capabilities, you might ask whether anyone who doesn't have a huge base of Fortran code should care about the new generation of Fortran. Indeed you should. Here's why.
The nature of today's computing challenges, and the direction in which many commercial and research areas are moving, is in taking on more complicated problems that involve far more code. When you add to the complexity of problems, the various languages with numeric computing capabilities do not rise to the tasks at hand equally. For many numeric computational problems, Fortran and C are comparable when it comes to computational speed. However, from the numeric point of view, Fortran is inherently safer for certain operations, as compared with C. Fortran's key focus is on highly dependable numerical facilities. If one is equally familiar with computing in any of these languages, and more or less language-neutral in orientation, one commonly concludes that Fortran is the superior alternative.
TIME FOR ANOTHER LOOK
If your last look at Fortran was in the days of Fortran 77, the choice of Fortran for new code may not be apparent. At that time, old-fashioned Fortran was not differentiated from the other numeric computing languages in this regard. With the advent of Fortran 95, the paths of the languages began to significantly diverge in terms of which were well suited for complex problems. Fortran 2003 is better still.
Indeed, when computing problems involve layers of data abstraction, Fortran 2003 is especially well supported for such challenges, a claim that none of the other languages can make.
Unlike C++, which requires one to do a lot of work with it to learn how to write code well, writing Fortran code is relatively straightforward. Fortran has much better support for detecting errors, and it does not give you as much rope to hang yourself with as other languages do.
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