re: #254 HoosierHoops

I don’t know crap about climate numbers…But we need to spend more money on IT..
It’s been 20 years since I’ve seen Fortran compiled..
/Hi Charles!

There are tens of millions of lines of Fortran code still in daily use, particularly in the scientific realm. A lot of it is highly optimized, and retooling it to work as well in another language is not a trivial task. So it’s used, as is.

Also, in the supercomputing realm, one of the main target customers are scientists. Again, in order to make use of existing code, Fortran is often the first choice, and that leads compiler designers to focus on Fortran in place of other languages, particularly where expensive performance optimizations are to be made. Also, Fortran’s relative simplicity makes compiler design quicker and easier, in addition to it’s long history of implementation. As a result, the Fortran compilers for supercomputers are often the most heavily optimized of all that are available, with C coming in second.

In short, Fortran is alive and well in many circles, and is probably never going to disappear.