Hello,

Jim Klein wrote:
> I'm looking for links which might help show that Fortran is not
> something you need a rosseta stone to use.

For purely number-crunching jobs I find Fortran (9x/2003) one of the
easiest programming languages; I wouldn't use it for heavy text
processing or graphical interfaces, though.

A non-computer wizard Ph.D student here [theoretical/numerical physics]
said, Fortran is her language and it works exactly the way she thinks.


> Is Fortran still taught in schools?

In our computer science department, it is too my knowledge not taught.
(When I did there my minor subject [8 years ago], we used a functional
programming language, Haskell, and JAVA.)
In my Numerical Physics course, one could use C or Fortran; however,
most students chose C (including me; the tutors were actually also C
programmers).

However, in the group where I started my master, Fortran 95 was the
programming language of choice.

I think this is typical: In computer science they don't teach it, in
Physics and numerical Mathematics they may teach it. Except for number
crunching, I think, hardly anyone uses Fortran, but in this field one
cannot really pass by Fortran. (Even using C one may want to use
BLAS/LAPACK ...)

I think on of the big problems Fortran has is: Most people only know
FORTRAN 77, which is really old and ugly (fixed format, no allocatable
variables, etc.).
Hopefully, the awareness of the modern Fortran 95/2003 increases.

* * *

Comming back to:
> I'm looking for links which might help show that Fortran is not
> something you need a rosseta stone to use.

To me it is not completely clear what kind of links you are looking
for. I can give you without any problem a list of programs, which use
Fortran 95 (some feature a beautiful code, others are older and not as
nicely written), which prove that Fortran is still actively used. (At
least in academia.)

For the easyness of use, you could compare e.g. a matrix
multiplications in C with the one in Fortran:
A = matmul(B,C)
or other matrix/complex number operations.

Tobias