Conclusion

Fortran has just undergone a veritable cultural revolution, in the true sense of the word. Sound and rigorous constructions, increasing the expressive power of the language and improving program reliability, have swept away a number of archaic conceptions. As a result, Fortran has emerged stronger in its chosen field of high-performance computing, while at the same time joining –! – the concerns of software engineering. However, this extensive modernization has had to retain the obsolete features of Fortran 77, for obvious reasons of reuse of existing code: this results in the current co-existence of two antinomic writing styles, considerably burdening – compilers right down to the lexical analysis level! Similarly, while professional programmers can only welcome the rejuvenation of their preferred language, occasional scientists and technicians may be perplexed by its apparent complexity:...