Pierre Hugonnet wrote:
>
>
> I know more than one...
> All Fortran programers still use f77 here (except myself). They have
> good and bad reasons:
> - good f90 compilers not available on all platforms
> - performances degradations from f77 to f90
> - people who really need modern features switched to C years ago
> - A lot a hidden dynamic memory allocation in f90 (some industrial
> packages make their own memory mangement and don't like this)
>
> In my opinion, the only attractive reason to switch to f90 (for both
> f77 and C programers) will be the parallel programming features.
Ease of programming is also a good reason. Array notation is more
concise and clearer (when used properly) than DO loops.
The translation from the original algorithm to the computer program is
more easier.
Dynamic storage allocation is easy to do in Fortran 90 and allow to
write programs that make a more efficient usage of memory.
Also, I am sure that most, if not all, of these "Fortran 77" programmers
use several extensions to the language, such as long names,
DO ... END DO, INTEGER*2, VAX Fortran records. Fortran 90 is an
opportunity to write portable programs even if these programmers use
only a subset of the language.
For C programmers, using a less error prone and easier to use language
is certainly more enjoyable, and on an economic side, allows to improve
productivity. For example, handling dynamic multidimensional arrays is a
nightmare in C.
But it is nevertheless true that Fortran 90 doesn't have the attention
that it deserves and the F90 user community has to work hard in order
to make it known.
Regards,
Jean Vezina
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|