PM me with details $$

2/26/2007 11:57:48 AM

FORTRAN 112 .. the basics !!!

2/26/2007 11:59:32 AM

I'm a fortran TA, what do you need help with?

2/26/2007 12:23:27 PM

who the hell takes fortran? do people really still need to learn this language?

2/26/2007 12:50:51 PM

required for ME/AE

2/26/2007 1:09:42 PM

and for NE

[Edited on February 26, 2007 at 1:38 PM. Reason : yo]

2/26/2007 1:37:58 PM

Dude...ask the TA's they'll help you out all the way. Sometimes they just give you the code. I mean the TA that I was working with, we pretty much wrote the code on the board while the students are telling what they think they should write down and we just correct them. But the point here is, go see a TA. They will help you.

2/26/2007 3:18:00 PM

^^^^ It's still the best thing for raw number crunching.

2/26/2007 3:20:11 PM

Not to mention the sheer number of existing fortran codes. I thought it was a waste to learn it too, but that's the main language for most of the simulation code at my company-- and when I worked at NASA. One of my on-the-side task now is updating a f77 code to 95 and bringing in some 2003 concepts. Sounds boring but intimately knowing a 60K line code your company depends on = job security.

[Edited on February 26, 2007 at 3:33 PM. Reason : .]

2/26/2007 3:32:58 PM

i too am a TA. let me know what you need help with

2/26/2007 4:40:16 PM

Quote :

"who the hell takes fortran? do people really still need to learn this language? "

i'm in aero and i use it every day.

[Edited on February 27, 2007 at 2:04 PM. Reason : caveat: they don't teach what's actually useful about fortran in the csc class]

2/27/2007 2:03:44 PM

^true true.

Modules, Explicit/generic interfaces, module procedures, derived data types, even operator overloading. C++ people will know this as classes and it's methods. Fortran can typically give an *engineer* pretty much all the oo techniques he needs for complex simulations-- of course not always. it's just not taught in the class at State. Hell, we didn't even cover pointers.

3/1/2007 10:48:54 AM

excuse my ignorance, but what can Fortran do that C++ or Java can't?

sounds to me that all Fortran has going for it is maintenance of legacy code.

3/2/2007 12:01:38 AM

Fortran is great for number calculations and processing (much faster and efficient than C++ or Java). Because of its age and syntax though, other languages have become more popular.

3/2/2007 10:20:06 PM

I have a friend taking Fortran using Fortran 90. How do you read in a text file, 5 items at a time, (3 ints, 2 double), if one of them is equal to something, then print out those 5 values on different lines?

3/3/2007 12:11:49 AM

majic

3/3/2007 3:30:32 AM

Quote :

"Fortran is ... much faster and efficient than C++ or Java"

i seriously doubt that.

maybe its faster and more efficient for crusty old mechanical engineers to maintain legacy code, than have to learn a new language and port a bunch of shit....

but youre gonna need to come up with a credible reference if I'm gonna believe its any more than that.

3/3/2007 3:45:17 AM

Darknight23, I'm not sure I entirely understand what you are trying to do... does the text file have like 5 columns of data and you want to read each value and print them out? I'm not sure what you mean by "if on of them is equal to something" but this is how you would go about reading from a file:

OPEN (UNIT = 10, FILE = "filename", STATUS = "OLD", ACTION = "READ", IOSTAT = EOF)

DO
READ (10, *, IOSTAT = EOF) a, b, c, d, e
IF (EOF /= 0) EXIT
WRITE (*,*) a, b, c, d, e
END DO


Where a, b, c, d, and e are the 5 values you want to read, EOF is an integer, and you put the name of the file in the "filename" part.

[Edited on March 3, 2007 at 9:33 AM. Reason : it won't let me indent to make the code nested within the loop...]

3/3/2007 9:32:11 AM

fortran is definately better for raw number cruching than c++ or java.

3/3/2007 10:31:39 AM

^^ probably should do a formatted read statement.

50 FORMAT( ...)
READ(10,50,IOSTAT=EOF)


^^^^^
well yes that's a big part of it. It's easier to interface legacy fortran with newer fortran codes than it is c++. You have to be careful and understand how each different language treats variables and stores them in memory when you are calling C from Fortran.

Performance is the other issue. Fotran will outperform java any day for the simulations we run. Prove to me otherwise, like you say. C++ on the other hand can rival Fortran in speed for certain applications. My understanding about this is that it is only recently that this is true. I think the majority of people who still say fortran is faster than c++, are carrying around bias from years ago.

No doubt, if I was to write a code from scratch I would use C++. But a lot of the older folks around here only know fortran so our main simulation codes will be stuck in Fortran indefinitely. Updating to Fortran 95 and using some 2003 concepts to improve it is fairly straight forward-- a little time consuming but straight forward. Changing over to C++ would be a nightmare. Remember all these folks tried that years ago with "f2c" -- wasn't good.

Like I said recent changes to Fortran gives the engineer enough object based concepts to write good code for their application, and after all it's just a tool to us. If it gets the job done fast than it's good enough. Fortran is a tool for engineers to model physical process and run large simulations that's about it. A csc major has absolutely no reason to learn it, c++ is much much much better.

[Edited on March 3, 2007 at 10:40 AM. Reason : .]

3/3/2007 10:39:53 AM

Quote :

"excuse my ignorance, but what can Fortran do that C++ or Java can't? sounds to me that all Fortran has going for it is maintenance of legacy code."

It's pretty clear you don't have any programming background, so why do you insist on bantering back and forth about what you don't know?

It is never really a matter of what something can and can't do, it's about which language is more suited for the task.

Quote :

"Quote : "Fortran is ... much faster and efficient than C++ or Java" i seriously doubt that. maybe its faster and more efficient for crusty old mechanical engineers to maintain legacy code, than have to learn a new language and port a bunch of shit.... but youre gonna need to come up with a credible reference if I'm gonna believe its any more than that."

Dude, are you trolling, or just being ignorant? Can you even invision a situation where something running with Fortran needs to be updated to run with Java?

At work, I code in a language based off of Fortran, tailored to the machine we use it with. It's highly efficient in that a single line of code can do what 20-30 lines of any other language would need to do. A group of guys within the company, that don't have software backgrounds (physics phd's) but know just enough about programming and software to be dangerous, had this grand scheme to convert our ~400,000 lines of code (~50,000 of that being the core program) to C++. They started the project at the mid of 04 and it was supposed to be in production and running by mid 05. Here we are in March of 07, and they are just now beginning production with it, and having a hell of a time getting it working. I think the line counts are doubled, and it's going to be an engineering productivity killer for ~200 engineers worldwide to have to get efficient in C++ now to do their job.

3/3/2007 11:08:34 AM

 


[Edited on March 3, 2007 at 4:09 PM. Reason : ]

3/3/2007 4:05:59 PM

hey i dont know anything about Fortran. and i know just enough Java to get into trouble. in embedded hardware design, the only thing i really use is C/C++

so im just trying to flush the Fortran advocates out. Try to get them riled up.

thanks for participating.

3/3/2007 4:09:09 PM

Oh, so you are a fag?

3/3/2007 10:58:40 PM

yeah, basically

but thanks for schoolin me






[Edited on March 4, 2007 at 3:29 AM. Reason : ]

3/4/2007 3:28:59 AM