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Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

fortran.io

191–200 of 255 posts

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#191
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of number crunching code relies on Fortran libraries even today. Install numpy, it will pull in Fortran stuff.

Numpy actually explicitly doesn't need fortran. It will use some fortran lapack libraries for optimizations if they're present, but it doesn't depend on fortran at all. Scipy is a different story. The need for a fortran compiler was a big part of the original rationale for the divide of numpy and scipy when they replaced numeric. Numpy was meant to be the lighweight/core version of things, and scipy was the full-fled…

Yep! Seconding what you said: A key aspect is that it’s very easy to write fast matrix math in Fortran. Vectorized operations are downright pythonic!

I was amazed how much more complex things were when moving to C++ (as opposed to C or C written in cpp files which you’ll find in academia and some books).

Of course, that ease is a hazard when all the modern (i.e. fun) sci-eng software development is in C++.

Do not grow complacent in school, ye numerical methods researchers! Write your stuff in C++. The job market awaits.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#192

Fortran actually isn't a static language. It's evolved over time. The last significant revision according to wikipedia is just over a year old. The beauty and horror of it probably depends which era of it you're looking at.

I’m a professional FORTRAN developer. I would say even FORTRAN 90 has a very rich and capable feature set. The problem is not the language, it’s the other developers :). A lot of codes have been developed by people used to FORTRAN 77, so even if they’re using new features the codes are poorly designed.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they've haven't got that right I would be sceptical what other insecurities are present.

Yes this brand new Fortran web framework may not be suitable for production use yet.

It doesn't say that anywhere on the site or their github page.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#194
post #185

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I'm ignorant. Who speaks Latin today under a different name?

Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.

I think that's pretty disingenuous. The fact that my cousins and myself are around doesn't mean that my grandparents aren't dead.

Latin is certainly a dead language, even though it has living descendants.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#195
post #163
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also like the saying "you can write FORTRAN in any language".

After Fortran got its array syntax 29 years ago, there aren't many languages that you can use to write array-manipulating code like in Fortran. Maybe just Julia and NumPy?

R, Matlab/Octave, Mathematica

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#196
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the highlights of Fortran's array manipulation capabilities?

Well, things like... you have 2, 2 dimensional arrays of the same size, A and B. You want to make a new array, where each cell in A is added to the same cell in B. So you are going to do a loop over 2 variables, right? in FORTRAN the code is... C = A + B in Julia the code is C = A .+ B

Interesting. Does it result in a compile error if you try arrays of different sizes? (If it's just a run time error, I don't see how it's different to implementing this with operator overloading in any language that supports it).

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speakers of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, and various other lesser-known languages and dialects. All of these are directly descended from Latin in exactly the same way that today's English is descended from 1900s English, just over a longer period.

I think that's pretty disingenuous. The fact that my cousins and myself are around doesn't mean that my grandparents aren't dead. Latin is certainly a dead language, even though it has living descendants.

Is 1900-AD English "a dead language" because nobody who spoke it natively is still alive? What about 1800, 1700, or 1000? What year did English die and if it did indeed die, what are we speaking now?

The reasons for considering English circa 1000 and English circa 2020 to be "different stages of the same language" but Latin and French to be "different languages" are an arbitrary cultural distinction not rooted in science. The English of Beowulf is just as different from the modern variety as French is from Latin. And at every point from the introduction of Latin into France thousands of years ago until the present day, everybody could communicate perfectly easily with their own grandparents, and thought they were speaking the same language.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still heavily used for numerical code in various places, especially aerospace (to avoid reverifying code with new languages or just to ensure new work can be accurately compared with old work) There's even a CUDA compiler. As I understand it, lack of pointers makes it possible for fortran compilers to parallelize code quite well.

Fortran does have pointers, though. [1] Maybe they are just not common for most math operations on matrices? [1] http://www.personal.psu.edu/jhm/f90/lectures/42.html

Multidimensional arrays are first-class in Fortran, so there's no need to use pointers there. There are some rules around pointers and subarrays that I expect make any possible aliasing undefined behaviour.

Re: Fortran.io – a Fortran Web Framework

#200

I'd like to hear some thoughts as to why one would choose FORTRAN over R, JMP, Excel, Python... other than for fun or familiarity?

Very different use-cases. All the other languages you've mentioned are great for statistical analysis and plotting but are quite slow - for R and Python by virtue of being interpreted rather than compiled. I dont know about the others. Fortran is often used in academia for intensive number crunching and parallelized code to run on computing clusters with 10s or 100s of cores. I work with some people who run hydrodyna…

> with 10s or 100s of cores

You could probably even add another zero (almost two) to this

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