Since you plan to spend a "considerable amount of time"
on what is likely to be your thesis, I'd suggest you
look into Fortran 95 before you make your decisions.
F95 has several nice features, modules and array
processing come to mind, that will likely make your job
easier. This doesn't mean that F95 is the right
solution. But I do think it's a mistake to make your
decision by only comparing F77 with matlib.
There are many attractively priced (free!) F95 compilers
available for academic users.
Dick Hendrickson
> Hi,
>
> I'm a Graduate student who's trying to develop a code for numerical
> solutions of the heat equation. I will initally be starting off with small
> (simple) problems, but will be building upon those to develop more complex
> code. Right now I plan to use a finite difference scheme to solve the
> problems. I have some experience in programming with FORTRAN 77 and
> MATLAB.
>
> The question I have is: which of the two would be more amenable to
> expansion and efficient numerical computations in the long run? Or is my
> question itself wrong, in that the effeciency depends upon the algorithm
> and my programming style? Since I plan to spend a considerable amount of
> time on the simulations any advice regarding the programming approach will
> be helpful.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Nirmal Govindaraju
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