LYCOS RETRIEVER
Fortran
built 199 days ago
An important supplement to Fortran 95 was the ISO technical report TR-15581: Enhanced Data Type Facilities, informally known as the Allocatable TR. This specification defined enhanced use of ALLOCATABLE arrays, prior to the availability of fully Fortran 2003-compliant Fortran compilers. Such uses include ALLOCATABLE arrays as derived type components, in procedure dummy argument lists, and as function return values. (ALLOCATABLE arrays are preferable to POINTER-based arrays because ALLOCATABLE arrays are guaranteed by Fortran 95 to be deallocated automatically when they go out of scope, eliminating the possibility of memory leakage. In addition, aliasing is not an issue for optimization of array references, allowing compilers to generate faster code than in the case of pointers.)
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An important characteristic of Fortran has always been that compilers produce efficient Fortran code. This has sustained its use for scientific and engineering projects from John Backus's time at IBM in the early 1950s to today. Some new features of Fortran 90, such as recursion, may produce less efficient code. However, the array features and optional arguments to subroutines are examples of features that will, in most cases, enhance the program's efficiency.
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The early releases of Fortran for .NET have limited optimizations for the MSIL code generation. Future improvements in this area, coupled with Microsoft's improvements to future releases of the CLR, will result in closing the gap between the execution speed of managed and unmanaged code.
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A series of Fortran 90 courses... from Liverpool for those who has some programming experience. You can tailor the course to how much time you want to invest and how deep you want to master FORTRAN.
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Like most of the early hardware and software systems, Fortran was late in delivery, and didn&"t really work when it was delivered. At first people thought it would never be done. Then when it was in field test, with many bugs, and with some of the most important parts unfinished, many thought it would never work. It gradually got to the point where a program in Fortran had a reasonable expectancy of compiling all the way through and maybe even of running. This gradual change of status from an experiment to a working system was true of most compilers. It is stressed here in the case of Fortran only because Fortran is now almost taken for granted, as if it were built into the computer hardware.
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Despite the primitive Fortran II compiled, which had no strings, the rather complex and flexible FORMAT statement was supported. In addition, another "control" card could specify how many decimals would be supported in floating point format; this feature looked forward to a vastly more flexible feature in today's Mathematica system.
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