Why is FORTRAN cool again?
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You mean besides the computed GO TO?
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
Ah, a connoisseur. It's really the only statement you need.
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Functional Programming and Parallelism Support perhaps. http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/PUBS/CACMcols/cacmJun10.pdf[^] Microsoft has introduced F# for this. Several others exist. Some dialects of Fortran may still be ahead in completness and performance. Seems plausible to me.
"Coding for fun and profit ... mostly fun"
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I concur. Parallel is all the rage. Fortran for the Crays and IBM vector processors had parallel extensions 25 years ago!
I started with Fortran II about then. I just downloaded and installed Fortran 95 from silverfrost. It comes with Visual Express. There is serious work being done with this product. It is free form with object support, .NET, etc., etc. If you are interested http://www.silverfrost.com/default.aspx[^]
"Coding for fun and profit ... mostly fun"
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The number of hits in google, yahoo, etc, etc. :rolleyes: IIRC they massage it somewhat, but that's ultimately what it comes down to.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
If that is so.. then the stats reflect the most popular language, that is being learned at the moment. I was under the illusion they reflected the most popular languages, that are desired in the job market at the moment. I also noticed, in the list of real programmers, qualifications, that it didn't mention anything about taking full advantage of the the Ballmer Peak.[^]
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:sigh: Do you realize the way they measure language usage is just silly beyond silly? It's like saying world wide corned beef production is up 3000% because 7 penguins died due to red devil attacks. Its all a farce I tell you and this has to come up in the lounge every so often. I think Rama Guru would back me up on this.
If the post was helpful, please vote, eh! Current activities: Book: Devils by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Project: Hospital Automation, final stage Learning: Image analysis, LINQ Now and forever, defiant to the end. What is Multiple Sclerosis[^]?
Man, that's a mean sounding hockey game just to get that Irish food.
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When exactly was the three-way IF statement not cool?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Three-way IF statement became uncool when FORTRAN-77 introduced IF THEN ELSE statements. (I helped implement them for FORTRAN on TOPS-10/20, which was written in Bliss-10...)
You have it backwards. It became cooler when that new-fangled IF-THEN-ELSE verbosity was introduced.
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I like to check the tiobe index http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html[^] every once in awhile to see what the trends are and usually it's pretty easy to explain why a language is rapidly gaining in popularity. For instance Objective-C is benifiting from the Iphone and Go is a new language so probably people are curious/trying it out. But I was suprised to find Fortran has almost doubled it's share since last year and is in the top 20 now. Is "real programming" coming back in style or something http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html[^] :laugh:?
Fortran is never cool, but it is still very very useful.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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Those of us that are required to come with interplanetary trajectories to other planets often care about such archaic languages :)
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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Some of us still use computers to crunch numbers and FORTRAN is hard to beat. And as one of the previous posters said the old code still runs. I know of 40+ year old code that is still running.
Clayton
But gosh, its so much nicer if you still have all the source code so you don't have to run it in a DOS shell or worse find an ancient sparc that still runs. I end up recompiling code on more recent compilers for some of my coworkers and they are just flaberghasted at how much faster it runs (10-20x) under newer compilers.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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Those of us that are required to come with interplanetary trajectories to other planets often care about such archaic languages :)
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
Just remember to use meters not feet. :)
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Just remember to use meters not feet. :)
Pshaw... we use astronomical units (AU) or kilometers. All other units are inferior, even if they are in same metric family.
ragnaroknrol: Yes, but comparing a rabid wolverine gnawing on your face while stabbing you with a fountain pen to Vista is likely to make the wolverine look good, so it isn't exactly that big of a compliment.
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Three-way IF statement became uncool when FORTRAN-77 introduced IF THEN ELSE statements. (I helped implement them for FORTRAN on TOPS-10/20, which was written in Bliss-10...)
CDMTJX wrote:
Three-way IF statement became uncool when FORTRAN-77 introduced IF THEN ELSE statements.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!