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by nine_k
1297 days ago
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Fortran us better than C and even C++ for its domain, high-performance numerical code. The guaranteed lack if aliasing allows for optimizations not always possible in C code. Built-in handling of stuff like complex numbers and even range types in modern Fortran (that is, supported for last 25-30 years), along support for parallelization, and with robust structured / procedural programming, is just the right tool for some jobs. BTW if you run fancy modern stuff like numpy, you run quite some Fortran, because it includes, for instance, BLAS. |
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For aliasing, in C, there's the restrict keyword, although it isn't used that often. If you take a look at BLIS or even BLAS, restrict isn't used. C++ doesn't have restrict, but that hasn't stopped the development of great numerical linear algebra libraries like Eigen or Armadillo.
C++ has had std::complex for... forever. And C99 has support for complex numbers.
Range types are handy, but not having them typically isn't a show stopper when designing libraries of numerical kernels. They are more useful for high-level prototyping, a la MATLAB. Nevertheless, it's not that hard to emulate the behavior using a well-designed API in C, or operator overloading in C++.
The only parallelism that Fortran has that C or C++ lack is co-array Fortran. I haven't used it myself, so can't speak to how useful it is. Both C and C++ have many options for parallelism: pthreads, OpenMP, MPI, C++'s parallel stuff, and tons of other libraries.
I'm not sure what "robust structured/procedural programming" is. I think Fortran is at a clear disadvantage compared to C and C++, here. The amount of boilerplate needed to define a function in Fortran is pretty painful. Fortran's control flow is a subset of C and C++'s, so any style of structured or procedural programming you would do in Fortran can obviously be done in C and C++.
And of course, numpy (and similar) call out to Fortran, but they call out to loads of C and C++, too!
This isn't to say Fortran is a bad language. I work with people who use it and prefer it. But the reasons you pointed out simply aren't valid. A good reason to use Fortran: you work in a group where Fortran is the language that's used and you want to be able to contribute to what's going on!