EvilZone
Programming and Scripting => Other => Topic started by: th3g00n on May 08, 2012, 09:25:19 AM
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I just wanna know if FORTRAN is still useful in this modern day world because my school insists we know it(it's part of the curriculum).
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Well AFAIK banking servers and probably other humongous corporations use it to run their systems. I don't know if it's useful to anything other than that these days.
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A lot of networks and corporations on the west coast are still on mainframes and really old systems. They are also still running old code, so I bet there are fotran is still used. Developing country's with second hand equipment are probably using fotran as well.
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Pretty sure my brother had to learn FORTRAN to run some sort of mainframe for doing scientific research, so I guess it is still used, depending on your field.
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It is always useful to know other languages.
Of course Fortran is not used widely anymore, but there are some specific areas that still use it, especially in physics and for supercomputers. It is a very good language for computations that need speed, because speed was what the language designers cared most from the beginning (btw FORTRAN's history is very interesting).
Also there are still people working on the language and the compilers. So it is not dead, it is just a language that settled in a niche.
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My father used to work with mainframes...
banks still use them, but the skill is not in much demand anymore, we found out the hardway >.<
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FORTRAN is not widely used even in mainframes any more. Most use REX; I had to learn some of it for a Mainframe competition I entered in a while back and it is needlessly complex and convoluted. I am glad we have left that era.
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In my college the mechanical students have to learn it... something about calculations, I don't know why they are not taught C..