> Our company is currently involved in a modernization project of our
> seismic processing system.  

Probably CPU-intensive code?

> Most of our code is written in fortran77.
> We are currently in a debate as to whether to go with fortran90 or C++.

Go with Fortran as it allows better optimisation than C++, and in the 
opinion of many is more readable and maintainable as well.

> One of the reasons for considering C++ is the perceived difficulty in
> finding programmers who know fortran.  

Advertise in the right places.  Most Fortran programmers are not 
computer science graduates, but physicists etc.  A short advertisement 
with a clear subject line in the comp.lang.fortran newsgroup or on this 
list might attract the right people.

> Another reason is the maturity of
> fortran90 compilers.  We have found fortran90 to run our code less
> efficiently than fortran77.  

What compiler are you using?  This is not true of all compilers, and
what differences there are will probably go away before your code is
rewritten.  Also, if you are interested in this small difference, then
you must also be interested in running on really fast hardware.  As that
at the moment is probably the 21264 ALPHA, you could use Digital's, err
Compaq's, compilers, which don't seem to suffer from F90 being slower. 
They are also full F95 compilers now. 

> In either case, we do not intend to rewrite
> all of our current fortran77 code in a new language, but would write the
> backbone of our processing system in the new language as well as any new
> code.  

In this case, it would probably be easier to use F90 than C...

> Our code is currently Cray dependent, and part of this effort
> will be to make the code portable.

...especially if you're concerned with portability.

> I would appreciate any comments on the above two fears concerning
> fortran90.

I wouldn't worry.  :)


--
Phillip Helbig                          Email ......... [log in to unmask]
Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories   Tel. ... +44 1477 571 321 (ext. 2635)
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UK-Cheshire SK11 9DL                    Web ... http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/~pjh/

************************ currently working at *******************************

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9700 AV Groningen
The Netherlands                   Web ... http://gladia.astro.rug.nl/~helbig/



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