have you seen www.fortran.com?

Dear me, where do I start? For me, FORTRAN is hugely efficient. It's one of the few languages where folks on the ANSI working group actually spend their careers writing automatic optimizers for the language and will raise a stink where a particular construct does not lend itself to efficient or safe optimization. Some of the optimizations performed by the top- end compilers are amazing to the point of one smacking one's forehead and saying, "Damn, that's clever!" At least at one time, it was true that FORTRAN was one of the most portable language, executing on the widest range of systems. I think one of the advertised attractions of the PDP 8/L that contributed to its success was that it could speak FORTRAN. Some of the earliest cross-assemblers that I ever saw were written in FORTRAN, that would pretty much run on any system that supported the language. This was back in the days when USASCII was a character set used on the minority of computer systems; not all were 2's complement (or even binary). Yet you could write a cross assembler (and probably a compiler) that would run on anything. I know of operating systems written in FORTRAN, as well as great hunks of several compilers. I even wrote my early data conversion routines on CP/M using FORTRAN for most of the code. FORTRAN used to have the only really reliable math routines. It's not a bad language to have under your belt. Does ACM CALGO still accept FORTRAN as a permissible source language? Cheers, Chuck