Re: Online F77 information...

magesing wrote:


It's not a question of which version of Fortran is easier or better to
use. I am learning F77 because I will have to work with, and extend,
some FEA codes written in F77 this summer. Once I have a good grasp on
'77 I will probably then learn '95 or '2003 (if I can get my hands on a
compiler) but for me, learning F77 is a must because of the legacy
codes.


Which means that you're missing the point. Everything (well almost) that
you'll need to "understand" the F77 code is relevant to the F90 and later.
That's one of the nice things about this language, you can combine new F90
code with old legacy code in a piece-wise fashion. If you "learn" F90 from
the get-go, you'll be able to translate things into newer constructs.
Benefits all around.

There do tend to be older constructs with common blocks and self-memory
management that you won't see in today's code that might strike a newer
Fortran programmer as strange, but I wouldn't really characterize that a
reason to keep all of your code in F77.

Really in this day and age, no one should be writing new 'F77' code without
horrendous external requirements. The current language definition is F2003
and the nifty thing is that if you really must, you can choose to code
strictly F77 and add (even incrementally) newer language features as you
feel comfortable with them.

I just don't see any reason to limit yourself to F77 language features.

Ed

.

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