Modern Fortran for today and tomorrow

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Fortran has been one of the key languages for technical applications since almost forever. With the rise of C and C++, the popularity of Fortran waned a bit, but not before a massive library of Fortran code had been written. The rise of scripted languages such as Perl, Python, and R also dented Fortran a bit, but it is still in use today for many excellent reasons and because of a HUGE library of active Fortran code.

Fortran 90 took Fortran 77 from the dark ages by giving it new features that developers had wanted for many years and by deprecating old features – but this was only the start. Fortran 95 added new features, including High Performance Fortran (HPF), and improved its object-oriented capabilities. Fortran 2003 then extended the object-oriented features; improved C and Fortran integration, standardizing it, and making it portable; and added a new range of I/O capabilities. Features and capabilities still on the developers' wish lists led to Fortran 2008 and concurrent computing.

I still code in Fortran for many good reasons, not the least of which is performance and readability.

Origins

Fortran was originally developed as a high-level language so code developers didn't have to write in assembly. It was oriented toward "number crunching," because that was the predominant use of computers at the time (Facebook and YouTube weren't around yet). The language was fairly simple, and compilers were capable of producing highly optimized machine language. Fortran had data types that were appropriate for numerical computations, including a complex data type (not many languages have that), and easily dealt with multidimensional arrays, which are also important for number crunching. For all of these reasons, Fortran was the language of numerical computation for many years.

The advent of C caused a lot of new numerical code to be written in C or C++, and web

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