[walshemj]

why is FORTRAN "terrible for other things" given that it has a lot of useful features for technical programming that more modern languages lack.

You could always look at ratfor if you need to do a lot of character based stuff.

Back in the day I even wrote billing systems and a device driver for PDP's using fortran.

[m_mueller]

Fortran's string support is optimized for easily logging or outputting the numbers you've just crunched. For everything else it's just way too clunky, which is CS people tend to move everything not very performance critical into non-Fortran wrappers. I find Python to be particularly well suited for that task. I've also found a nice and simple module to give Fortran executables a unix style CLI[1]. Putting all this together with GPGPU acceleration makes a pretty mean combination for scientific computations.

[1] http://home.comcast.net/~urbanjost/CLONE/KRACKEN/krackenhelp...