Whither Fortran?

Pros

• "The only truly universal language for writing programmes in science and engineering is Fortran."
• F90 designed to produce very fast executable binaries.
• more portable than C/C++;
• easy to learn;
• parallel coding facilities;

C/C++

• C++ poorly designed: enormously innefficient, difficult to program in (contrast Objective C);
• alledgedly: Bill Gates claimed that his biggest mistake in designing NT was adopting C++ for the graphics coding, the resulting code took years longer to write than it should have and ran terribly slowly;
• pointers are integral to C/C++ and lead to drastic innefficiencies --- F90 programmes run faster!
• linear memory model totally unsuitable for parallel coding;

Wharton, 95

Fortran 90 proved superior:

• performance (speed);
• code readability;
• optimisation.

References

• Should C replace Fortran as the Language of Scientific Programming?, (Wharton, 95)
  
  
• FORTRAN 90 vs C++ - an educational perspective, (John Prentice, 1996, local copy)

Newer Fortrans

• Fortran 90
  
  
• Fortran 95
  
  
• HPF
  
  
• Fortran 2000
  
  
• F and Elf