Re: Fortranspeak & Javaspeak


<David.Paterson@xxxxxxxx> wrote
I'm a Fortran77 programmer (computational fluid dynamics etc.) and am
trying to work with a Java programmer who is writing a front end.

Neither of us understand a word the other one says. I don't understand
him when he talks about class, instance, method, referencing, casting,
event, constructor, accessor, bytecode, overriding, registering etc.

He doesn't understand me when I talk about subroutine, common, real,
logical etc. He doesn't even know what a "program" is.

Is there a translation guide between Fortranspeak and Javaspeak?

I've figured out that "method" means "subroutine"; I program his
"class" using "named common"; his "referencing" is like an "equivalence
statement". Take it from there.


As a Fortran 77 programmer that has had to learn GUIspeak (or more
accurately Object Oriented Design terminology), I fully understand your
problems. My advice is not to try and understand each others worlds, just
agree on a neutral interface that you are both comfortable with. In my
programs I always interface Fortran libraries into Java or Delphi GUIs
through an API, which is basically just a collection of procedures
(middleware) that load and retrieve data from the Fortran code (getters and
setters in OOspeak) and invoke processes (run subroutines). Keep the API
procedure calls very basic (no data structures except 1D arrays, always pass
array lengths, unpack strings to null terminated character arrays etc) to
minimise inter-language issues. Do this and you will never have to know what
an overloaded method of a typecase instace is and they wont have to get
their head around equavalenced COMMON real data.

The API is a bit more work and processing overhead than you would ideallly
want, but it is worth it to keep apart radically different elements of a
mixed-language program/application/applet.

Paul Holden



.

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