Comment by BeetleB

4 days ago

I'm well aware of it. And as late as 2007, I was forbidden from writing those dialects. Professors wanted everything in Fortran 77.

8 comments

BeetleB

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wglb  4 days ago

Interesting. Did they explain why?

  • Scharkenberg  3 days ago

    I had a similar experience about ten years ago at a German university and I don't get it either. However, I did not dare ask why at the time, as I did not want to start a discussion with a potentially vengeful professor.

  • BeetleB  4 days ago

    They knew Fortran 77 and didn't want to learn Fortran 90+. I think they also had compatibility concerns. Unsure if there are any, though.

    In over a decade in academia, I found only one person writing Fortran 90 (this was in 2001). He did it because he didn't tell his advisor he was doing it.

    • pklausler  3 days ago

      Many “standard” features are not completely portable, since their specifications are ambiguous, incomplete, not validated by prototype implementations, and not enforced by public test suites. This makes Fortran compiler development hard; should each feature in a new compiler be compatible with existing compilers, or with the language in the ISO standard? And when the ISO committee changes semantics or breaks long-standing guarantees of the language like the integrity of parentheses, should a compiler break code?

    • pjmlp  3 days ago

      Basically the same kind of fossilised professors that would teach C89, and C++98 after going through C as prerequisite, in 2026.

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