Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.dal.ca!silvert
From: silvert@cs.dal.ca (Bill Silvert)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Summary: Easy for novices, portable.
Message-ID: <1990Jul26.105740.12282@cs.dal.ca>
Date: 26 Jul 90 10:57:40 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu>
Sender: silvert@cs.dal.ca.UUCP (Bill Silvert)
Reply-To: bill%biomel@cs.dal.ca
Organization: Habitat Ecology Div., Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
Lines: 22

In article <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu> moshkovi@cn.ecn.purdue.edu writes:
>Please, don't consider my question offending, but why the hell in this world
>you people still using FORTRAN, while so many nice C around.
>

That's easy.  For one thing, novices can write Fortran code with minimal
training, and we want scientists to be able to work with their own code
without having to assume that programming experts understand what they
want to do.  Stuff like file-handling and I/O are hard, but equations
are easy to handle.  I write the main program and utility subroutines,
my colleagues work on the guts of our ecological simulation models.

Languages like C and even Pascal are not as easy for novices to
understand, and portability is a major problem.  I can port our models
to all kinds of machines -- PC's, Mac's, ST's as well as mainframes --
without modification.

-- 
William Silvert, Habitat Ecology Division, Bedford Inst. of Oceanography
P. O. Box 1006, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, CANADA B2Y 4A2.  Tel. (902)426-1577
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