Fortran: Converting Old To Modern Fortran Prerequisites
This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.
This course will cover the important programming tasks that used to be messy or complicated in Fortran 77, and can be done more cleanly and effectively in modern Fortran (i.e. Fortran 90/95/2003). It is intended for people who have been using Fortran for many years, but have not been following the recent standards. It is also intended for people who have an older, but still valid, Fortran program and want to clean it up and make it easier to understand and maintain. It will cover only aspects of old Fortran (i.e. Fortran 77) that can be improved by replacing them, and not the totally new aspects.
Experience with programming Fortran (any dialect, old or modern); it is assumed that the audience has written at least a 1,000 line Fortran program or done comparable modifications to an existing program. Users with limited experience should attend the "Introduction to Modern Fortran" course (and then practice what they have learnt) first, or they are unlikely to understand this course. Basic knowledge of a command line program development environment (any system, even VMS or MVS), as might be gleaned from the "Introduction to Unix" course.
- A very brief history
- Appropriate tools and techniques
- New facilities not covered (and why!)
- Why to change and what it will cost
- Taking advantage of modern features
- Modules, interfaces, arrays, I/O etc.
- Free-format, improving structure etc.
- Deprecated and undesirable features
A presentation, with questions at any point.
- The first quarter of this course is common to "Decoding and Converting Variant and Old Fortrans".
- This course is spread over two afternoons to make it easier for moderately experienced Fortran programmers.
- It will not cover derived types, semantic extension, and similar new features for "object oriented" programming.
- Users who want to convert a program that is currently not compiling or is not portable may find the course "Decoding and Converting Variant and Old Fortrans" useful as well.
- More information may be found in http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/courses/OldFortran/
One half day session
Events available