Re: Online F77 information...

Terence <tbwright@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"magesing" wrote
I'm teaching myself FORTRAN 77,

If you have an F77 compiler stay with learning F77.
F90 is far too complicated to start with.

I 100% disagree with Terence on this... and on several other things as
well. I won't bother to detail the disagreements - just to note that
they exist.

I personally happen to think that restricting oneself to f77 is far too
complicated. You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to work
around limitations that aren't a problem in f90.

Reminds me of my experience in undergrad school. I was fortunate enough
to be way ahead of my class in math at the time. There were no end of
undergrad engineering classes in which this allowed me to briefly listen
to a description of the problems to be addressed, after which I
recognized that I knew how to solve problems like that, so I could skip
the next several weeks of class while everyone else plowed through doing
the problems the hard way because they didn't have the math background
to do it the easy way. (Knowing aboiut eigenvalues and eigenvectors was
particularly helpful - sure were a lot of things in undergrad
engineering school that reduced to eigenvalue problems).

Let me specifically note that the OP's one specific question so far
about language features is one that can not be done portably in f77, but
is a standard feature of f90 - namely non-advancing I/O. There are
various nonstandard compiler-specific ways to do it in f77, but none
that are portable. People ask about that here quite regularly. Sometimes
they are people who discover that the nonstanadrd way they did it with
one compiler doesn't work now that they are using a different compiler.

In f90, the anwser to this one is simple. In f77, there are lots of
variants and caveats, including the possibility that you might not be
able to do it at all with some compilers.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
.

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