Calling All Math Guys: Fortran Comes to Mac OS XCalling All Math Guys: Fortran Comes to Mac OS X

When I was a newly minted programmer, we programmed in FORTRAN (it was all capital letters then), COBOL and other geeky languages like that. C was pretty new, and C++ hadn't been invented. BASIC was around, but it was a teaching language for universities.

If you were doing business computing, you used COBOL or RPG, a report-writing language. If you were doing scientific or engineering work, you used FORTRAN.Now, Fortran  the modern versions have only capitalized the F  has come to Mac OS X, thanks to Absoft. Their company's new Pro Fortran 10.2 compiler works on Intel-based Macs, and is compatible with Apple's Xcode 3.1 integrated development environment.

I'll have to admit: This is not really the first Fortran compiler for Mac OS X. The Free Software Foundation offers a Fortran compiler, but it's based on the old Fortran 77 language specifications. Absoft's is compatible with the newer Fortran 95 spec.

If you care about such things, you'll also care that the Absoft Fortran compilers can produce both 32-bit and 64-bit code, so it can take advantage of all the Intel chips used in Mac desktops and notebooks. Absoft also includes a graphical debugger, which is essential for getting your code to not only work right, but also work fast.

Why would you want to program in Fortran? It's not only for dinosaurs (like me). For scientific and engineering work  where you're manipulating numerics to do problem solving  there's nothing like it.