Re: help me

[David Fokkema <dfokkema@ileos.nl>]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 05:36:51AM -0400, Kevin Mark wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-08-11 at 11:59, mohamed roshdy wrote:
> > i wanna really to learn fortran and i am waiting for acourse or ebooks
> > on net plz write to me
> There are many better and newer languages to learn. (perl and c for
> example). And these have many sites for help. the linux GCC compiler
> suite does support fortran, so that part is covered. What is the reason
> you want to learn a not very popular langage? Just curious.

I can only guess of course, but _my_ reasons for learning Fortran 90
were that it is actually a very popular language. Note, Fortran 90, not
77, and this is _not_ supported by GCC. There is the g95 project which
is in a pupil state, according to their site. There are only non-free
compilers available, AFAIK. F is a rather good one, at least for my
purposes.

Fortran 90 is popular in science. Fortran means FORmula TRANslation and
is specifically designed for mathematical purposes. No other language
can rival its standard vector and matrix manipulation constructs, for
example. Of course, you can add classes and overload operators in C++,
so you'll get it to work. But, in Fortran, it is standard.

Fortran not only has advantages of course. There are many downsides as
well. Still, it works for me. I'm using it for my master thesis work in
the field of theoretical physics. Everyone uses it around here, :-)

Sidenote: if I want to program a random piece of code, I always use C.

David