Talk:Fortran

Naming policy
You might want to consider the WB:NP. You current naming convention is depreciated and has several disadvantages - like it has no navigational links. Also you worthy effort is neiter considered a book nor a section inside a book. See wikistats which implements an exstensive book and section detector.

--Krischik T 07:15, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Fortran 90/95 vs. Fortran 77
I'll be helping developing this wikibook, as I'm currently doing a project in Fortran. However, I will concentrate on Fortran 90/95, and not Fortran 77. Right now they are intertwined with each other, so I will segregate the tutorials for Fortran 77 into a separate section, if there are no objections. --Arthurv 11:49, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Why would a 2006 Fortran book begin by discussing problems with Fortran 77? Just delete all the 77 stuff - its 30 years old. And its already online if anyone wants it -- see
 * Out of print and now online.

I've never looked at a Wiki book before, so there is a lot (everything?) that I don't know about them. Unless all Wiki books have the same purpose, it would help if this book began with what its purpose is, what it will and will not do. If readers don't know the purpose of the book, makes it hard to comment on (that's an argument for knowing the purpose, not for concealing it!).

Rwwww 23:20, 1 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Fortran 77 is still alive and well. --Swift 07:25, 22 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Despite its age F77 is still very commonly used in scientific computing. However, it would be very good idea to make separate wikibook for F77 and F90/95 standards. Even thought they are not very far different, they are different enought to do so. Now this is like making a same textbook for german and dutch... 130.232.104.44 12:22, 6 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I would hardly compare German and Dutch. Perhaps Dutch and Flemish would be more apt. F90/95 is, moreover, (mostly?) backwards compatible with F77. The Compaq Fortran Language Reference Manual designates extensions to the F95 standard with a different colour text. A pretty neat solution in my mind. --Swift 20:32, 6 September 2006 (UTC)
 * F77 is forward compatible with f90 and not the other way around. 128.220.23.214 01:04, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Some of the deprecated features of Fortran 77 were removed from the Fortran 90 standard, (e.g. pause) but most compilers maintain backwards compatibility for the convenience of users with legacy code. The biggest fields for the language are computational chemistry and meteorology and I have never seen any new code written in Fortran 77 in the 10 years I've been writing code for weather modeling.  It's not simply not practical to restrict yourself to 6 character variable and subroutine names in a program of any size.  While there are many fine libraries like LAPACK and BLAS still written in 77 there is absolutely no reason to write new code in anything but the newer standards.  GNU Fortran is free, Open64 free, Oracle gives away the old Sun Fortran for free, and they all support at least the 1990 standard and they're all fast.  Teaching anyone to code in 77 is a waste of time.

Fortran 77 should definitely neither be deleted from, nor ignored by this book. Right now I have to learn Fortran 77 to find my way round a (scientific) program, that was written in the late 80's and is to be extended by me. And I'm very thankful for those tutorials that still exist in the web. I suggest not to make seperate books, but different chapters of the different versions. Compare de.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran for inspiration. (You'll get the idea, even if you don't understand any German.) -- Macumba (talk) 13:41, 27 February 2008 (UTC)

I work in science and there is a lot of existing fortran code around, most that I have dealt with is fortran 77. It is common to need to read an modify this code. However most people have moved from g77 to gfortran compiler, so you could call it fortran90/95 that happens not to use the new features. For it would be most useful to have F90/95 book, with comments about what is new, and examples of old/obsolete features (that should maybe be avoided or removed). 194.36.2.211 (discuss) 16:50, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Fortran vs. FORTRAN
The current spelling of Fortran does not use all capital letters, so I have changed "FORTRAN" to "Fortran", except when FORTRAN 77 or an earlier version of the language is being referenced.

Somehow, there are still general references to the language using all capitols throughout the book. I guess new editors have reintroduced this style. PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 10:48, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Complete overhaul
I think this whole document should be reorganized. The subsections seem kind of arbitrary and no clear order is obvious. For new readers it would be hard to use it in any way. --HerrHartmuth (discuss • contribs) 18:16, 26 August 2018 (UTC)

Suggested partitioning
Suggest partitioning the Fortran wikibook into two separate wikibooks: I feel FORTRAN 77 (and earlier versions) and Fortran 90 (and later versions) are sufficiently different that they would be better served by completely separate treatment, whereas versions of Fortran 90 and later are similar enough that they can be covered together (with any differences noted/marked simply and clearly)  &mdash;PowerPCG5 (discuss • contribs) 05:12, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
 * 1) A FORTRAN 77 wikibook using fixed-form source layout and covering FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77; and
 * 2) A Fortran wikibook using free-form source layout and covering Fortran 90/95/2003/2008/2018, where any feature that does not exist in all five versions is simply and succinctly marked with ‘F95,’ ‘F03,’ ‘F08,’ and/or ‘F18’ tags (or better yet, specially created icons) to indicate which version of Fortran first supported it; features that began to be deprecated or obsoleted could in contrast be marked by one of those ‘F95’/‘F03’/‘F08’/‘F18’ icons, but with a  ⃠ crossing it out, to indicate with which version that feature began to be deprecated/obsoleted by the relevant ISO/IEC 1539-?:* standard.


 * There is Fortran 77 Tutorial, but that seems more limited in scope. Mbrickn (discuss • contribs) 01:35, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't quite understand this partitioning. What features should be classifies as 77/66? Many old features are still used in modern fortran. If they arent, then they should simply be labeled as obsolescent. Furthermore, fixed source formatting is not a feature that is specific to Fortran 77/66. It's possible to write 2018 code in fixed source style. PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 10:39, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Coding style in sample code
There is no consistency in the coding style for the code snippets in this book. This does not set a good example for coding standards of new programmers. For example:
 * The use of all capitals for fortran keywords is useful for textbooks that are printed in black and white, so they can be easily distinguished. But this book has a mixture of upper and lower case. It arguably does not make sense to use upper case because the wiki allows for syntax highlighting that makes visual identification of fortran keywords easy. It can also be a bit misleading for new programmers to think the capitals are required, as they might not yet know that fortran is case insensitive.
 * Indentation.
 * Whitespace between fortran keywords/arrays/functions and parentheses. The convention I like is to use no spacing for array indexing, functions and subroutines. Fortran statement keywords should be visually distinct from functions and arrays so I use a space for those (e.g. write statements are not functions) PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 11:10, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Questioning relevance of documenting fortran
I don't think the section documenting fortran should really be included in the section called in-depth fortran ideas. It nit really about the language specifically but rather other software to create documentation. Maybe move it to an appendix? PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 14:02, 5 June 2021 (UTC)

Disparaging introductory paragraphs
Much of the introductory text in this book has a vey negative/disparaging attitude towards older versions of Fortran. While this attitude is in some cases waranted, it is ultimatemy unproductive here and completely dissregards the progress that has been made in modern Fortran standards. PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 14:10, 5 June 2021 (UTC)


 * You're correct. It should be written from a neutral point of view. Mbrickn (discuss • contribs) 01:33, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Overloading in fortran and beyond
Why is overloading in a section called Fortran and beyond when overloading is a core feature of fortran? In fact, why is this section even called Fortran and Beyond? What does that even mean? Shouldn't it be called something like "Extended Fortran Ecosystem Software" PropellerPlus (discuss • contribs) 14:18, 5 June 2021 (UTC)


 * It should probably be made into it's own section, as you say. Mbrickn (discuss • contribs) 01:31, 15 January 2022 (UTC)