Star A Beginner's Crash Course into Object Oriented Programming
Linked by John Collins on Wed 21st Apr 2004 06:42 UTC
General Development The purpose of this article is to give a novice programmer the basic idea of what OOP is, as implemented using PHP. Readers should have a basic knowledge of programming ie what variables are, variable types, basic methods of writing comments, and how to enter code into a text editor.
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RE: OOP with Fortran, any interest?
by Christophe Grandsire on Thu 22nd Apr 2004 13:05 UTC

Would anyone be interested in seeing a similar tutorial done in modern Fortran?

What do you mean by "modern Fortran"? The currently used standard, Fortran 95, is no OO. OO programming can be approximated (I personally did it, developing a whole library in Fortran 95 using an OO-like structure with private types put in modules and getter/setter functions to access these types), but it's very much like Perl 5's OO: a hack to simulate OO programming in a procedural language, and it's not easy to maintain.

Fortran 200X will be completely OO, but the standard is not ready yet and no implementation exists of it.

In all seriousness, I'd be quite interested in doing so, as that's a language that's not oft-mentioned in these circles. A little breadth-of-experience could be interesting for many readers here.

I agree. Fortran *is* a nice language, which has evolved a lot since the days of Fortran 77 and fixed-form lines. Fortran 95 is a very modern programming language, with an interesting syntax (although it sometimes annoys me to no end ;) ) ). For heavy array calculations, Fortran stays the best language out there (which is why one of the best fluid mechanics simulation package out there, Fluent, is written entirely in Fortran) and with the right libraries, it can do many other things (I personally write programs with full GUI entirely in Fortran, thanks to the Winteracter library). Fortran 200X will have complete access to the C libraries, thus providing tons of useful features without need for rewriting.

In my hierarchy of favourite programming languages, Ruby is the uncontested winner (being the first language I saw that seems to *guess* my needs before I even articulate them ;) ) ), but Fortran is a good runner-up, probably because it took me only three weeks to learn enough Fortran 95 to be productive (without formal course). Only Ruby has a better score here (I've had formal classes of C and Pascal, and tried to teach myself Java and Python, but never managed to get productive in those). And note that I am *not* a programmer by education, but a engineer ;) (in my current job, I am slowly becoming a programmer, though, which is why I had to learn Fortran ;) ).

Anyway, I agree that an introduction to Fortran 95 would be a good idea (if only to dispel the myth that Fortran is outdated ;) ). I could help if needed.