Fortran bashing in the MATLAB newsgroup

FYI, here are some comments from the MATLAB newsgroup about Fortran:

(begin quote)

I see Fortran as a language that's continually changing to
try to keep up with more modern languages.

There is one sole reason for teaching (and learning) Fortran
these days: To be able to read and understand old code, in
order to port the algoprithms to some other language.
The fortran language as such is obsolete.

The die-hards
always claim that Fortran is fast because its simplicity
makes it easier for compilers to optimise (undoutedly true
for Fortran 66 constructs).

Not quite true. The reason Fortran is fast is that it
lacks dynamic memory management (that was added in
fortran 90 or 95, a mere 15 years ago). Everything is
easy once the memory maps are fixed at compile time.

And then in the next breath
they point out all the new features added to the latest
(77, 90, 95, ...) version that have added all the
flexibility of newer languages and are clearly are no
easier to optimise than any other language.

Sure. Selective memory must be most convenient.
I wish I had that, too...

As for optimizations, I've played a bit with
template metaprogramming in C++ for some time now,
and it seems to be one serious beast. Templates
allow the programmer to code readable code, at the
same time it allows the compiler to do some
serious optimization.

The newer
incantations of Fortran just allow old code to persist (and
fester, undocumented and unmaintainable).

Most certainly agreed!

(end quote)

I've got my own ideas about what modern Fortran is good for and why I
still use it. I also have my own ideas about why it is fast for
certain tasks.

Before I give my own 2 cent reply to the other neswgroup, I was
wondering if the experts out there had any comments they wish to
contribute about what modern Fortran is good for, why they still use
it for new projects vs C or C++ or Java, etc., or any other related
comments. Thanks.

James Tursa

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: goto, again
    ... The moral or your story isn't the compiler or the language, it's the decision to "use every possible bell and whistle" within the language. ... The actual strength of Fortran is that F08 _will_ compile virtually all legacy FORTRAN. ... That some used non-standard extensions or wrote less than perfectly legible code is independent of the language--as your example shows, one can do that in far more "modern" languages than F77. ...
    (comp.soft-sys.matlab)
  • Re: Surprise
    ... haven't seen any Fortran libraries that do that. ... Libraries are a huge part of the reason why one language would be ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: one-liner for characater replacement
    ... convert to another language. ... upgrade to upward compatible versions of the same language. ... Under the above rules of the game, unless the Fortran world announces ...  The user base has not shrunk all that much. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: interpretive vs. compiled
    ... for specific needs in FORTRAN. ... Nowadays, workstations are also available to engineers, and there's no ... Excel/VBA and much less exposure to programming. ... colleges are wondering what language to use in classes. ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: Help from fellow Fortran Users
    ... and Fortran in which he introduced the subject of Pascal, ... Pascal is a useful, high-level, portable language that is easy to use ... Inasmuch as his comments considered extensions for Pascal in the '70s, ... standard differs from ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)