Re: what to buy now?

On Feb 22, 3:59 am, "Terence" <tbwri...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The problem is that if you buy a commercial Fortran compiler it will
work (hopefully) until you no longer can buy a computer with, as O/S,
the Microsoft Windows software that the compiler (that you paid for,
and paid maintenance for) will work on.
The compiler might even need more expensive stuff like MS C++
compilers and .NET and Visual Studio.

For example, I use CVF 6.0 on Microsoft 98 and 2000 systems which are
now not supported by Microsoft.
Even though I bought the newer Intel 9.1, I don't use it because I
understand CVF by now and don't understand the Intel version.

I suggest you acquire and support with comments (and possible bug
reports) one of the free Fortran compilers available.
This is the only way Fortran programmers can hope to have any future.
And especially if you are in the private sector.
Only very very large companies (Nuclear? Aerospace? Power?) can afford
this merry-go-round.

I agree that one should try the free Fortran 95 compilers, gfortran
and g95. In fact I recommend trying both, because g95 supports the
entire Fortran 95 standard (gfortran is almost there), whereas
gfortran is faster and catches some errors in non-standard programs
that g95 does not.

If you used "afford" in the monetary sense, I disagree. I work for a
financial company with about half a dozen researchers where the annual
amount spent on software and data is certainly > $100K and maybe >
$1000K. A perpetual license for a commercial Fortran compiler costs
about $1K -- a blip in comparison. Companies with engineers spend a
lot of money on licenses for Matlab and its toolboxes, and if you want
to create a stand-alone program, buying the Matlab compiler is a big
expense.

Commercial compilers such as Intel Visual Fortran and Lahey/Fujitsu
let one write GUI programs within Fortran. The free compilers produce
console programs or DLLs.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is it time to legitimise REAL*8 etc?
    ... Some vendors phased out their F77 compilers over 10 ... No need to support a seperate F77 compiler as, ... experience with F77) that the F95 programming is safer than the F77 ... Authors are not chosing more recent Fortran ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: what is the most suitable Linux platform for Programmers and software developers
    ... C, C++, Perl, Python, Lisp, and a bunch of other languages are supported ... There are FORTRAN compilers, but FORTRAN ... Look at the Linux ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)
  • Re: Is it time to legitimise REAL*8 etc?
    ... Some vendors phased out their F77 compilers over 10 ... No need to support a seperate F77 compiler as, ... experience with F77) that the F95 programming is safer than the F77 ... COMMONs remain available with any FORTRAN version. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Declaration to get 8-bit (or 16-bit) integer?
    ... Supported by all the current compilers that I've tried it on. ... Not likely to become standard in the foreseeable future. ... Syntax standard-conforming, but semantics not guaranteed of course. ... The meaning of the code not obvious to anyone but a Fortran guru. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Casting malloc
    ... If he can make a strong case for the diagnostics, ... Uh, again, Fortran is a better tool for some sorts of work. ... familliar what Fortran compilers only in the code they generate; ... Given a variety of hard problems, Fortran consistently came up much faster with default code and no explicit optimizations. ...
    (comp.lang.c)