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Why are most climate models in Fortran?

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Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#131

Post by tobmlt »

hilbert42 wrote: post #130
tobmlt wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty cool, thanks for the details! This is about what I’d expect from ancient FORTRAN. (I read fortran IV off Wikipedia, maybe there was fine print)

You'll note from one of my other posts that FORTRAN-IV was my intro into programming. However, that was toward the end of the decade not the beginning. By then, many universities were running the WATFOR FORTRAN-IV compiler from U. Waterloo. At the time it was anything but ancient. We students felt both cocky and privileged in that we knew that we were some of the very few people in the country who had access to a sta…

I like it! Sorry to call older dialects ancient. Being a Fortran programmer is somewhat like being from a red state, I find. I naturally self deprecate (or stick with c++ as appropriate) in front of others.

I used to work on a system that was older than me, but immaculately refactored (to the authors admittedly rare taste) through the years. It had run on all kinds of hardware in the 80s, but was different enough from its predecessor programs that I am not sure what all it ran on - I recall maybe DEC, maybe pdp this and that, maybe a 360?? being mentioned. The guy who led the team that wrote it passed on two years ago now. Man he was a trip! He wasn’t old. He used to smoke, darn it.

Sounds like you had some fun times with the 360! Makes me want to retro-compute a bit. Actually my phone makes me want to retro compute as well, every time I “type” on it. ;)

Cheers!

Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#132

Post by TheRealKing »

For heavens sake, let's stop the discussion of Fortran array index starting at 1. In Fortran the starting index can be anything. A(-10:-5) is valid, A(-10:10) is valid, A(1:10) is valid, A(0:10) is valid. Choose what you want and do not complain about it again, please. No other language has this amazing capability.

Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#133

Post by Gibbon1 »

hilbert42 wrote: post #129
Gibbon1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was a SDS Basic or a variant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_BASIC#MAT_commands

OK, thanks. I've not used that. The problem I had was that I learned Fortran before coming across BASIC, so converting Fortran programs was often a problem when features where missing.

I looked again and the basic I remember was on the HP 9845B that I used for a while.

https://www.hp9845.net/9845/software/basic/

Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#134

Post by hatmatrix »

cozzyd wrote: post #107
hatmatrix wrote: post #38

C and C++ are definitely the competitors to Fortran; not Chapel or Python. In the life sciences, large amounts of Fortran code has been rewritten in C/C++. But they have orders of magnitude more funding than climate science and teams of professional programmers to maintain the code. Fortran is a domain-specific language for scientists, and excels at array arithmetic (for graph-based problems though, maybe look elsewh…

There's a saying among physicists that you can write Fortran in any language.

I've seen it with my own eyes. It's not pretty, but usually works.

Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#135

Post by madhadron »

gnufx wrote: post #101
madhadron wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's just a misunderstanding. I think it was Perlis who said, "We don't know what the programming language of the future will look like, but we know it will be called FORTRAN."

Hoare said "I don’t know what the language of the year 2000 will look like, but I know it will be called Fortran". He also said "ALGOL 60 is alive and well and living in Fortran 90", which is a decent compliment from him.

Ah, thank you.

Re: Why are most climate models in Fortran?

#136

Post by hilbert42 »

Gibbon1 wrote: post #133
hilbert42 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, thanks. I've not used that. The problem I had was that I learned Fortran before coming across BASIC, so converting Fortran programs was often a problem when features where missing.

I looked again and the basic I remember was on the HP 9845B that I used for a while. https://www.hp9845.net/9845/software/basic/

Thanks for that. I've just checked the link and will do so again in more detail.
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