3 ms·

Back in school (mid-90's), I made a point of taking a FORTRAN introductory class to go along with all the other work I was doing in Pascal, C++, Lisp, etc. For

Back in school (mid-90's), I made a point of taking a FORTRAN introductory class to go along with all the other work I was doing in Pascal, C++, Lisp, etc. For most of the class, FORTRAN felt mostly like a penalty box. It was full of behaviors and limitations that dated straight back to the early 1960's, if not earlier. It was at least easy to make it do the things it could do. Where my opinion of FORTRAN changed was in the last time that class met. By that point, we 'knew' the language and the instructor was on to more advanced topics, including optimization. He made a point of how an optimizing FORTRAN compiler could re-nest three nested loops for the purpose of automatically improving memory access patterns. Vector Cray machines (which implemented common looping patterns in hardware) shipped with FORTRAN compilers that could take normal-looking loops and turn them into code that optimized for the hardware. I don't know if it's still the case (thanks to restrict and better compilers), but he made a compelling point at the time for the simplicity and restrictions of the language leading to more options for optimization.

dralley 3y ago
>I don't know if it's still the case (thanks to restrict and better compilers) Nobody (really) uses restrict, certainly not at scale. This is especially obvious because when Rust came along (which can effectively use restrict in most places, much like Fortran) it uncovered a lot of serious bugs in LLVM's implementation for restrict. That whole situation only really stabilized in the past year or so. Maybe GCC does a better job as a result of having gfortran.
8bitsrule 3y ago
"as of 2022 programs have been written in Fortran for over six decades and there is a vast body of Fortran software in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities.... It is the primary language for some of the most intensive super-computing tasks, such as in astronomy, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics.... Since the early 2000s, many of the widely used support libraries have also been implemented in C and more recently, in C++... For this reason, facilities for inter-operation with C [1] were added to Fortran 2003 and enhanced by the ISO/IEC technical specification 29113, which was incorporated into Fortran 2018... " [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Science_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Science_and_engineerin... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface

dralley 3y ago

>I don't know if it's still the case (thanks to restrict and better compilers) Nobody (really) uses restrict, certainly not at scale. This is especially obvious because when Rust came along (which can effectively use restrict in most places, much like Fortran) it uncovered a lot of serious bugs in LLVM's implementation for restrict. That whole situation only really stabilized in the past year or so. Maybe GCC does a better job as a result of having gfortran.

8bitsrule 3y ago

"as of 2022 programs have been written in Fortran for over six decades and there is a vast body of Fortran software in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities.... It is the primary language for some of the most intensive super-computing tasks, such as in astronomy, climate modeling, computational chemistry, computational economics, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics.... Since the early 2000s, many of the widely used support libraries have also been implemented in C and more recently, in C++... For this reason, facilities for inter-operation with C [1] were added to Fortran 2003 and enhanced by the ISO/IEC technical specification 29113, which was incorporated into Fortran 2018... " [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Science_and_engineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Science_and_engineerin... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_function_interface