April 29, 2005

I've been writing Fortran all day at work, and I can honestly say that 
it is a dead language.  Fortran, even the modern 95 standard, is missing 
so many key elements that other modern languages have.  The most glaring 
problem with Fortran is the assanine pointer system.  Fortran 77 used 
something called a Cray pointer previously, which was a horrendous 
example of how to deal with memory addresses.  I would hardly have 
called them pointers, in fact.  Fortran 95 has a new pointer type, but 
they neglected to implement a true void-typed pointer.  So all pointers 
in Fortran must be strongly and properly type cast.  A pointer that has 
been defined as a pointer to a 2D array can never, ever point to a 1D 
array!  Besides that, the whole module dependency issue makes compiling 
Fortran 90 and 95 take at least ten times longer than any other 
language.  If you ever change a public function in a module, even just 
make a new one available, then every single file that calls that module 
and any module lying downstream from those calls must be recompiled.  If 
I make any public module changes, i start compiling my relatively small 
code and walk away for 10 or 15 minutes.  

Oh, and let me tell you, Absoft makes what I would consider one of the 
worst pieces of software I have ever seen.  It is a freaking joke.  The 
compiler (yes the actual f90.exe) crashes on a regular basis in the 
middle of compiling on my Windows PC.  It's worthless.  

The new gfortran compiler may breath some life into Fortran, but I think 
its day has passed.  I can do everything in C or Java that I can do in 
Fortran with little or no speed difference.  And C and Java make it so 
much easier.  

H2G2 tonight!  7:00PM!  Oh baby!

-Jeff
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