Why Fortran 90?
Fortran is the most important language developed specifically for scientific computation. Decisions in the Fortran standards were specifically chosen to benefit performance and stability, and Fortran programs produce fast, highly optimized, stable codes with a minimum of user effort, as compared to other languages. Some examples include: • Limited support for pointers: pointers in Fortran do not prevent the compiler from optimizing array operations, and accidentally overwriting array bounds is less likely in Fortran. • Support for arrays as fundamental language objects, which makes parallelization straightforward. • Support for complex data types and basic matrix operations as language intrinsics. • Hints to the compiler to communicate how variables are used (specifically, the INTENT descriptor). • Simple extensions of Fortran codes to parallel codes with comments (via OpenMP or HPF). Generally, arguments for switching to languages has been based on experiences with the archaic and fai
