Everything that's wrong with modern Fortran

[fleeblewidget]

I'm sure that the geeks reading this are probably thinking "isn't that an oxy-moron?", but they're wrong. These days, Fortran has many of the features you need to program in a modern style, including such new-fangled ideas as object-orientation, parallel processing and pointer manipulation

Comments

[megadog]

I'm a hardcore old-school FORTRANner. Trained on FORTRAN-60 because it was portable between pretty much everything [remember that back in the 1970s we had machines with 24- 32- 36- or 60-bit native wordlengths, and you chose between BCD, ASCII, EBCDIC, FIELDATA or a slew of other character-codes].

You should not trust the compiler to deal sensibly with mixed-mode arithmetic [remember that if you perform a calculation involving INTEGER, REAL and DOUBLE-PRECISION variables [all of which are defined by reference to the architecture of the target-platform] the outcome is only ever guaranteed to the precision of the lowest participant].

Occasionally, people track me down on the basis if comments embedded in some CFD code I did 30 years ago. They ask me "what does this bit do?" and "Why did you code it that way?" My instinctive response being "if you don't understand, you should not be asking the question!"

I really miss my CDC-7600 with its native 60-bit word. "THUD" - a.k.a a Honeywell 66/DPS-300 - was nowhere near as much fun, with its silly 36-bit word lebgth.