14 Jan
2025
14 Jan
'25
4:04 p.m.
>>> A bad reason to pick Fortran or C is
having been taught it at school
>>> and then making no effort to update one's skills at any point in the
>>> intervening decades.
>> This assumes that your professors are teaching
Fortran 66 instead of
>> Fortran 2025. I'd be interested to know what you believe its defects to
>> be.
>
> I first taught Fortran in community college in Fall 1983.
> In the lab, we used the IBM/Micorosft Fortran, which worked very well for
> THAT task, but had some serious deficiencies. A "Sieve of Erastothanes"
> compiled in it ran slower than in BASICA. Bob Wallace (who was still at
> Microsoft) warned me to avoid the run-time library.
On Tue, 14 Jan 2025, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote:
Microsoft Fortran was a joke, but I liked Bob Allison,
one of the
developers. He retired at age 35. Ryan-MacFarland Fortran was promoted
by IBM for the AT. I reported problems with it. I eventually got an
invitation to buy the next version, but by then I had been using Lahey
F77L for about a year. We found an error in F77L complex divide and
expected the same sort of "reply" we had gotten from Ryan-MacFarland.
The next day, Bruce Bush called and told me "type this into your fix
file." I asked "what's a fix file?" He told me it's a small text
file
that the compiler reads and patches itself when it loads. We stuck with
Lahey until Tom retired. By then, he wasn't selling his own compiler,
but rather the Fujitsu Fortran 95 Windoze compiler that he had modified
for Linux. Fujitsu didn't provide any meaningful support, never
provided a 64-bit compiler, and never provided Fortran 2003 or anything
newer. I use NAG and Intel now. gfortran has too many bugs and too many
weird interpretations of "standard compliant." It refuses to compile
some of my clearly-compliant modules. It gets occasional fatal internal
errors and offers to send a message to the developers — from whom I
never get a reply. Intel ifx is free and by far the best for run time
performance, while NAG is by far the best for both compile-time and
run-time diagnostics. ifx is free but nagfor isn't.
My courses were SO beginning (first-single semster, no prerequisites)
that the differences were relatively unimportant. We had to spend two or
three of the eighteen 3 hour lectures on "What is a program?" and how to
compile. I had a couple of students with prior college courses in
programming, but some of them had never learned anything about what
happened between leaving their deck of cards on the ocunter, and
picking up output hours or day later.
First assignment was "write a program to display YOUR name."
Freeform input would indeed be a lot easier for beginners! Formatting the
input was a struggle for some. (obviously, only at the very beginning)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com
My FORTRAN experience was from fifteen years
prior (PDQ FORTRAN, WATFOR,
and FORTRAN 4?), so, until I managed to catch up, I was teaching my
students to write FORTRAN programs in Fortran77.
Damian Rouson teaches classes in parallel programming. About two weeks
into the course he reveals to his students that they're using the
coarray SPMD features of modern Fortran — far easier to use and
understand, and generally more efficient, than MPI or PVM.