[cks]

I was actually under the impression that Fortran was used simply because the experts (in this case in fluid dynamics) was familiar with Fortran. It was the language they learned and used while back at the university. At least this is the impression I got from working in the field.

I never heard of anyone suggesting we should use Fortfran for performance reasons, instead there was an ongoing movement to evolve the code, moving it to use the OpenFOAM solver that's written in C++.

[jmaygarden]

Matrix operations can be faster in FORTRAN than C because of differences in the way arrays are defined/implemented in each language.

[stephencanon]

This is just totally false. You can lay out your C arrays in exactly the same way that Fortran does, if you choose to. Or you can do something else, if that will give better performance. Tools are just tools; they don't determine what you can do with them. (I write matrix operations for a living, generally in C or Assembly; much of what I write is provably as fast as possible on the target hardware, so it could not possibly be faster if written in Fortran).