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Gerald I. Evenden wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:200902181009.36432.geraldi.evenden@gmail.com"
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<pre wrap="">On Wednesday 18 February 2009 7:01:00 am Jan Hartmann wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">Long ago, I did this using named common blocks and extern C structs. Why
won't you use named common blocks? I understand the dangers of the
unnamed common, though.
Fortran 90 seems to have more possibilities for data representation. I
never worked with it, but see an example at:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2008-01/msg00170.html">http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2008-01/msg00170.html</a>
Jan
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
My original question was not a particularly serious one and I was only
interested if there was a trick to using FORTRAN that I was unaware of when
dealing with C[++] structures.
I am aware of the 'common' usage and that was why I was trying to excude it
from the conversation. 'common' is quite restrictive compared to general
usage of passing structures and pointers through program processes.
The only other point that I would make about intermixing FORTRAN and C[++] is
that I would only consider using C as the entry mechanism and any FORTRAN
code would be processes called by C.
Because of my personal history of starting with machine language and then
graduating to Balgol 58 and then Algol 60 before being sent into the
purgatory of what I call the "Dark Ages" where I was forced to use FORTRAN
for several years, I have a rather jaundice opinion of the language.
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I had the singular luck to have started programming around 1980 with a
procedural language: Simula 67, an extension of Algol 60. The nicest
thing about it was that it had the "Class" concept, a mixture of
structs with function, that got popular with C++ and later 5th
generation languages like Java and Javascript, only much simpler.
People *will* make simple concepts as complex as they can, won't they?
It was really a beautiful language for learning purposes, and I never
understood why it more or less disappeared. It's unbelievable how much
profit I still have, even today, from starting off with that language,
if only from not being tempted to use faulty programming practices. And
then, I knew what a class was around 1980, when almost everyone was
still struggling to debug Common Blocks, unnamed or not. It's still
available on Internet I believe.<br>
<br>
I only have used Fortran when nothing else would do, especially in
linking libraries (like NAG) or with parallel computing. In my Simula
days, a program compiled with Fortran ran three times as fast as a
Simula program, so I translated my 3D visualisations line for line from
Simula (or Pascal) into Fortran. They had to run in 1M of internal
memory too (16 M if you ran them at night and used all the resources of
the University computing center), so some kind of optimization was
required. Funny things happen when you corrupt a common block, and send
the code to a pen plotter. It goes absolutely haywire, and the
Computing Center won't be amused. So I hated it! Switching array
dimensions in multidimensional arrays when interfacing Fortran to C may
seem simple (it is, conceptually), but *will* run you into impossibly
hard to find bugs, like running a complete Computing Center to its
knees, no matter how careful you are. <br>
<br>
I really don't see any reason nowadays to program in Fortran, not even
Fortran 90 (although I don't know that), but parallel processing. Don't
know much about that either, but I followed a course here in Amsterdam
at SARA computing center, and it still seems easier to optimize
parallel programs written in Fortran than in any other language. From
what I saw of those parallel programs (like weather forecasts) didn't
look all too complex to me from a programming point of view, just a few
differential equations that were repeated zillons of times. I did some
user interface programming, and it would be fun to see that done in
Fortran. Well, fun if you really hated the person... <br>
<br>
Jan<br>
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