Re: CPAN equivalent for fortran?

On Fri, 30 May 2008 10:05:21 +0100, Thomas Robitaille wrote:

Hi everyone,

I've been programming in fortran 90/95 for over 5 years now, and I enjoy
very much the new modular and object orientated features that fortran
now includes.

In fact, it seems to me that fortran is at a stage where it should
become easier to start exchanging full modules rather than individual
routines (as in numerical recipes for example). For instance, I've
developed for my purposes a module which defines vectors and all the
operations associated with them. Of course many other people have done
this too. I've also written a couple of modules which have interfaces
defined for f77 libraries (e.g. PGPLOT or CFITSIO).

I have come across various websites where programmers make available the
routines that they use. However, in some cases it is hard to know
whether this code is being maintained, etc., and how popular it is.

As far as I am aware, there does not appear to be any large centralized
repository for fortran 90/95 modules, where users could leave comments
about the modules, rate then by e.g. code quality, speed, etc... I think
this would be invaluable. So some kind of mix between the CPAN archive
for perl, and sourceforge for complete programs or libraries.

First, am I missing the obvious - does such a repository exist? If not,
do others agree that this would be useful? I don't think I have the
experience to set up such a system from scratch, but I would certainly
be happy to be involved in helping in some way.

Would such a system be difficult to set up? Are there existing
frameworks that have been developed for other languages that can be used
for this?

To cover the obvious, there is no equivalent to CPAN for fortran. There
seems to be a goodly amount of fortran on the web, but there's nothing with
the centrality and breadth like CPAN, so I think you're stuck having to
find your libraries with the help a search engine, and when you run into
trouble, post here for refinements.

I think you'll have trouble trying to find volunteers for an effort that
takes many men-years. Maybe a scaled-down addition to the fortran wiki
instead?
--
Ron Ford
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A petition to J3 apropos FORTRANs future
    ... >> web programming, GUI development, and text analysis. ... >> may partially explain the small market share of Fortran. ... almost NO new code would be written in the language. ... time on the types of codes that scientists and engineers want and need to ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Case sensitivity
    ... Academic field is not influenced by fashion to that extent. ... you won't find a program in Fortran. ... In fact, fashion is the major reason for the survival of Fortran, which is very tedious and inefficient for a lot of scientific programming despite the fact that it was originally designed for it. ... Although there were and are indisputably folks who don't like these standards, the fact is that the vast majority of implementors immediately adopted Forth-94 and have been very happy with it. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Re: Fortran compilers for multi-core chips
    ... >multi-core chips. ... >Will Fortran programs need to be written differently to maximize speed? ... Let me also recommend "Programming with Hyper-Threading Technology" by Richard ... Gerber and Andrew Binstock - Intel Press, ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Fortran now in the Great Language Shootout
    ... > representative of how Fortran compares to the other programming ... > languages than the current naive implementation in multiple languages. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Why do you use smalltalk?
    ... I started programming in 1977 using Fortran to do engineering ... I continued doing a lot of engineering simulation ... The next question was which programming language should I use. ... Oriented Dynamics Simulator in Smalltalk starting from scratch. ...
    (comp.lang.smalltalk)