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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-called-FORmula-TRANslator-for-a-reason dept.

While it may not be widely appreciated, the Fortran programming language is still a thing. Last year, NASA ended up being overwhelmed by the sheer number of responses to their contest to optimize a Navier-Stokes equations solver used to model aerodynamics, to be evaluated on the Pleiades supercomputer. Fastest implmentation would have won the first prize, however there were far too many to evaluate. Fortran is quite old but neither outdated nor complex and nothing beats it for number crunching. So in many cases it is still the right tool for the job.

Many thought that the competition will never start due to the lack of applicants. In fact, it was cancelled for the exact opposite reason.

Quoting NASA's Press Release: «The extremely high number of applicants, more than 1,800, coupled with the difficulty in satisfying the extensive vetting requirements to control the public distribution of the software made it unlikely we would achieve the challenge's original objectives in a timely manner.»

Next up, MUMPS?


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:39PM (9 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:39PM (#767516)

    Ah, FORTRAN. It was one of the first languages I learned all those decades ago. FORTRAN 77, RPG II, COBOL, BASIC, PASCAL and Assembler. I liked FORTRAN so much better than those others.

    / end of whimsical sentiment

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:50PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:50PM (#767519)

    10: PRINT "Welcome to your happy place"
    20: GOTO 10

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:12PM (2 children)

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:12PM (#767530) Journal

      Safe Loop:

      stay = 'y'
      while stay == 'y':
          print("Welcome to your happy place")
          stay = input("Enter y to stay: ")

      Infinite Loop:

      while True:
          print("Welcome to your happy place. You will never leave here . . .")

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:38PM

        by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:38PM (#767545)

        std_check(out);
        -> ERROR.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:25AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:25AM (#767696)

        print("Welcome to the Hotel California")

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:55PM (#767521)

    You can write FORTRAN in any language.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:56PM (1 child)

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:56PM (#767554) Journal


    1 REM THE GREATEST, COOLEST PROGRAM EVER!!!!!
    5 CLS
    10 INPUT "Did you really learn FORTRAN before BASIC";A$
    20 IF A$="NO" THEN PRINT "I didn't think so. You said one of the first."
    25 IF A$<>"NO" GOTO 40
    30 GOTO 60
    40 IF A$="YES" THEN PRINT "Liar! Nobody would learn BASIC after FORTRAN!"
    45 IF A$="YES" THEN GOTO 60
    50 PRINT "You need to answer YES or NO"
    55 GOTO 10
    60 PRINT "You stink!"

    --
    This sig for rent.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:27AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:27AM (#767697)

      My answer is "No"

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @11:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @11:17PM (#767559)

    No... I prefer RPGII more, ASM is right there too, since RPG and ASM where line by line a match except for IO..
    COBOL was to typing heavy.
    Fortran looks to unstructed to seee patterns in the code entry.
    PASCAL == "C"
    BASIC was my first language, on a HP2000F, those were the good days in mid-70's

    Back to RPG and ASM... wrote preprocessor for both of them to support extra editing, performance improving, and doing a better including source and macros, so when those change, all programs using it were automatically compiled and tracked for the release pull. Even supported placing a older version back and recompiles would be handled to roll bacck all programs to earlier version. Make support 1M lines of RPGII and 256K lines of assemble just a 2 man job.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29 2018, @10:29AM (#767698)

      We learned on a PDP-8, except for BASIC and Asm, which was on original dual-floppy IBM PCs.