Despite the fact that Fortran is the the oldest computer language born in the 1950s, and numerous modern languages have evolved ever since, Fortran, as the way it is spelled today, is juvenilized and still used by many people, after undergoing significant modifications and improvement in the past two decades that are rarely seen in any other languages.
The modern Fortran has evolved to its current form significantly different from its ancestor with many new modern language features. Inherited from old FORTRAN standards and enhanced by the newer ones, Fortran is still the language of choice for scientific computing for its intrinsic support for real and complex floating point operations as well as the natural expression of multidimensional arrays. Its array handling, enhanced by index slicing, makes array processing similar or identical to its counterparts, such as MATLAB, hence superior to any other programming languages. The unified interface of intrinsic functions for all data types makes translating mathematical expressions to computer programmes a lot cleaner and easier. Further, since the standard 2008, the introduction of co-arrays has made writing parallel code that can run on multiple core computers and clusters trivial, one needs not to know the traditional message passing interface (MPI) library, nor threading. They are built into the syntax of the language itself.
This module is a companion to the Parallel Programming with C++ module, where you will find the features missing from Fortran that are more essential to general purpose computing than number crunching. We will show some of the practice of interlanguage programming, through which the shortcomings of Fortran could be complemented by interfacing with C/C++.
This module contains live classes and homework assignments.
The live sessions will take place on Wed., Nov. 9; Thurs., Nov. 10; Mon., Nov. 14; Wed., Nov. 16; Thurs., Nov. 17; and Mon., Nov. 21 from 4pm to 5pm Eastern Time.
- Teacher: Baolai Ge