OT: Language for the ages

[Patrick Finnegan]

John Allain declared on Friday 14 October 2005 02:16 pm:
> > Are there any schools teaching FORTRAN and more? Does it
> >have an active community? If not, ...
>
> Amazingly*, Yes.
> I go visit my old college bookstore every few years for fresh titles
> in Computer Science (this year: I bought O/S internals by Stallings).
> It's a top 25 undergraduate engineering ranked place with a big
> budget for new equipment so I was quite surprised to see this year
> the book "Classical Fortran" by Kupferschmid.  In my head I'm thinking
> Fortran is Only for classiccmps and classiccmps are Retired equipment.
> Apparently this course is for maintenence programmers.

Fortran is still VERY heavily used in supercomputing/HPC[1] environments, 
like where I work.  It's such a big deal, that most people don't want to 
use a machine/OS unless is has a good working Fortran 90 compiler on it.

1. High Performance Computing: covers everything from big iron 
supercomputers from the likes of Cray and IBM to things like clusters of 
cheap-ass Linux boxes, which people use to get as many FLOPS as they can 
from.

PAt
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