Dear Fortran Fan:
Thank you for your well thought out comments.
We may be at slightly cross purposes - so as clearly as an Australian can say anything:
1. I did not write the program or the comments. I thought these original comments were indicative of a lot of poorly researched data and programs one can find on the Internet. We have gone from the Publishers being reasonably selective about what they publish and usually but not always making a reasonable effort at fact checking - one can of course think of the old poorly fact checked books - to random garbage on a lot of websites - the Internet for Fools. Interestingly Wikipedia seems to be at the publisher standard on most engineering matters.
2. I posted them on the Forum as they contain a small amount of humour in the comments, and from the fact that the writer failed to do even cursory checking of the Internet to see how easy it is to either solve the problems or find such things as this forum who have real experts who can answer these questions in a few minutes. Clearly a writer who is not doing a simple reference check is a poor writer.
3. In the olden days, say 1980, a Civil Engineering degree typically included a course or so based on Fortran. I had 2 - one in 1977 purely on Fortran and one in 1979 based on the standard Conte and de Boore book. Which is now available online. It was hard but it set up one up for a life of programing and data analysis. Most engineers went on to avoid Fortran, but at least they were aware of it as they plugged away with limited data in EXCEL, but in 1980 we only had limited data.
4. Now my students who are working on very large data sets, 3.4 million real data points every 8 minutes in one file, they want to use EXCEL or MATLAB as their professor(s) use EXCEL and MATLAB, I would opine for the ease of teaching. So that Felippa's novel 18 dof 3 node plate element originally written Fortran is now available and taught in MATLAB.
% AUTHOR C. A. Felippa, June 1984 % Converted to Matlab from Mathematica, by S. Golmon, N. Ledford, % L. Liu, April 2009 % VERSION June 1984 - see attachment.
I asked Felippa for the Fortran code and he provided some of it, but what happens once he retires. We need to rewrite from MATLAB to Fortran, which I did and this forum helped with the hard bits.
So now I am working with two very well educated engineering graduate students at the moment, they will both be full professors if they want or rich consultants. We are looking at correlation in signals, there are wonderful libraries in MKL Fortran that do so much and the code to implement what we want to do is say 300 to 400 lines - a solid days work. They can use MATLAB really well and use a lot of routines, which is good for checking one signal of short length, now try continuous signals at 2000 data sets per second. But they have been taught MATLAB, not Fortran. So as far as I am concerned they are not prepared for a real world that is now solid wall to wall data. If you want to analyse it fast you can use C or Fortran. Ok, some like Python, but I just do not like the syntax. I could do what I want to do in LISP in a lot less than 400 lines, but I do not have a week to wait for the answer.
So my students are real engineers, they can solve quite complex problems, they just cannot read and find the mean of 3.4 million data points in less than an hour in excel.
In very narrow terms a real engineer is someone who knows how to do it fast always the fastest way, do you want the person installing your sewer on your new house using a backhoe or a shovel. The people on this forum fit into that category by default, why else would mecej4 say that the water analysis program would run faster in Fortran -- he was of course correct and a weekend moving the code from C# to Fortran was well worth it.
So I return to my students, I suppose I need to teach them Fortran
John