back to article Fortran greybeards: Get your walking frames and shuffle over to NASA

NASA wants scientific computer experts to take a look at one of its oldest software suites in the hope they can speed it up. The code in question is called "FUN3D" and was first developed in the 1980s. It's still an important part of the agency's computational fluid dynamics (CFD) capability, and had its most recent release in …

  1. jake Silver badge

    A portion of US$55,000?

    Those of us still (re)coding large projects in Fortran for Fortune500s don't even get out of bed for that kind of small change. Might want to offer a trifle more if you're serious, NASA.

    1. frank ly
      Happy

      Re: A portion of US$55,000?

      "... improved CFD will flow on to the rest of the aerospace industry, helping design more fuel-efficient, lower-emission aircraft."

      And a percentage of the cost savings?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A portion of US$55,000?

      Those of us still (re)coding large projects in Fortran for Fortune500s don't even get out of bed for that kind of small change.

      Indeed, that's rather funny. I write Fortran for a living (it is still very much alive in scientific and technical programming, greybeards quips notwithstanding), and $55K will just about pay for a complete professional rewrite of a smallish numerical code. I'd estimate no more than 15K LOC - assuming that you need it to actually work correctly, to be documented, have at least a minimal-coverage test set, and not fall to pieces the moment I walk out of the door. Also assuming this is all done at cost, or even a bit below (ie by internal staff).

      Messing about with a million-LOC monster which started out in the dinosaur era, and had multiple sheds built on its back since then is definitely extra.

      Unfortunately, large fraction of the academic and government research universe is addicted to having a continuous supply of disposable students and postdocs. Invariably, they are led to believe that if they they just stick about for a little longer and finish their degree and couple of postdocs despite being paid a fraction of what their work is actually worth, the bright future is right ahead. Well, it never actually is: the academic system in most of the world has been operating in a steady-state regime (or even contracting, if we talk the UK) for decades. There are no jobs waiting for these students and postdocs; in fact by pursuing their "training", they destroy these jobs - why hire a competent, fully-trained staff when the same money will get you four eager students or two postdocs?

      Call it internal outsourcing, if you will.

      1. JimC

        Re: addicted to having a continuous supply of disposable students and postdocs.

        Quite true, but isn't that the way its supposed to work? Disposable students and postdocs b****r off to industry and make decent living with far better fundamental training and breadth than industry would/could give them, whilst miniscule number of really brilliant people stay in academia doing pure work, and a slightly greater number stay in academia to train the next lot of bright eyed grads? That is, after all, what Universities are for - provide an endless supply of trained people.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: addicted to having a continuous supply of disposable students and postdocs.

          Quite true, but isn't that the way its supposed to work? Disposable students and postdocs b****r off to industry and make decent living ...

          Why should it be like this? We do not train people as surgeons with an expectation that they will eventually work as nurses, do we? Then why do we train people for advanced degrees in physics, chemistry, biology, or math, knowing full well that nearly all of them will never be able to find gainful employment in the field they studied?

          More importantly, why do we keep lying to the young people about their actual job prospects when we encourage them to get STEM education?

          I was once invited to a career planning fair for third-year university students (chemists, if I recall correctly), to offer a perspective from a government research laboratory. I was really shocked to see how little idea these rather intelligent and motivated young people had about their actual prospects in research. Only a handful of them had any hope of landing an academic job, and may be a few more would ever work in their profession once they get their degrees - yet this was pretty much the first time anybody at the university has actually told them so, and shown then the actual numbers.

          I was not terribly surprised not to be invited again next year: the universities have an obvious vested interest to mislead the students into taking useless degrees. For a vast majority of students entering the university, getting trained as a bricklayer (Have you tried to hire a half-decent bricklayer recently? What they charge is murder, and you actually have to get on a waiting list to get one!), plumber, electrician, or a chef would be a far better choice.

          1. fishman

            Re: addicted to having a continuous supply of disposable students and postdocs.

            "More importantly, why do we keep lying to the young people about their actual job prospects when we encourage them to get STEM education?"

            To create a glut of STEM graduates to push down the salaries.

          2. JimC

            Re: addicted to having a continuous supply of disposable students and postdocs.

            > Only a handful of them had any hope of landing an academic job, ...

            > yet this was pretty much the first time anybody at the university has actually told them so,

            Can anyone capable of getting a reasonable degree from a reasonable establishment really be so dumb and naive as not to realise that if there are, say, 100 students a year coming through your college, and ten staff members who will hope to have a 40 year career, then jobs in academia are going to be few and far between? None of us were in the slightest doubt about it in biological sciences at Imperial in the 70s. Hell, the not really very funny joke was that you needed a phD to wash bottles at the top establishments in zoology.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A portion of US$55,000?

      If I:

      knew Fortran;

      was American;

      didn't have small children;

      I would have settled for a one-way trip to Mars

  2. Ole Juul

    Old stuff sticks around

    I recently found a nice little Blog engine that required regular compiling to update the blog with static pages. I'm no programmer but was pleased to see that FreeBSD has a compiler for modern Fortran in the base distribution so no problem. Things don't change as fast as we tend to assume.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: Old stuff sticks around

      That version of Fortran is part of GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection). It's a good implementation, and getting better. Wiki gfortran and gcc for more ...

      1. Brangdon

        Re: Old stuff sticks around

        I had a quick look but I couldn't easily tell whether it can use GPUs for parallel code. Does it?

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Old stuff sticks around

          Brangdon, look up OpenCL, and possibly libgomp.

      2. MarkSitkowski

        Re: Old stuff sticks around

        Just don't try to use that compiler on legacy code, like SPICE. Through the misguided idea that people use Fortran to write new code, they 'updated' it, to the point where it fails miserably on memory management, misinterprets the common block and bitches about Hollerith formatting. I believe it isn't actually a compiler, but a preprocessor, which converts your Fortran to 'C', then runs that through gcc. I've seen the same approach used by other Fortran so-called 'compilers'.

  3. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Run it on a computer 10 times faster? Where can I get a good exchange rate for $55,000 ?

    1. jake Silver badge

      Your supercomputer is 10 times faster than NASAs? I'm glad I don't have to shove shillings into your meter!

    2. Pen-y-gors

      Faster hardware?

      Hang on - if the code dates back to the 1980s then the CPUs it's running on now are about a million times faster than the original ones. If it was fast enough 30 years ago, why is it too slow now?

      1. fishman

        Re: Faster hardware?

        "Hang on - if the code dates back to the 1980s then the CPUs it's running on now are about a million times faster than the original ones. If it was fast enough 30 years ago, why is it too slow now?"

        They try to analyze more complex problems. And it can take several weeks to run.

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: Faster hardware?

        It was slow back then. With several orders of magnitude less data to crunch.

  4. AndyS

    If you have some old code, and you need to find someone with a very specific set of skills to modify it, isn't the usual route to, you know, offer a paid job? Of which I'd guess this is maybe 1/4 the expected annual salary, at the low end.

    Can I try this if I have something I need done? Come and cut my grass! There's a chance you'll win a portion of £5!

    Come and stack shelves in my shop for a year! I'll maybe give you a bit of £2/hour at the end of the year!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I seem to recall something about a Trumpian hiring freeze at the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, that affects cool departments like NASA, as well as the despised ones like the Department of Education or the FCC.

    2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

      Congratulations! You have understood how the "gig economy" works.

  5. rusty_wheat

    Try compiling the stats program R from source and you'll find out whether your computer has a Fortran compiler or not.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Or you could just type fortran --versionat a command prompt.

      GCC is kinda handy to have around.

      1. Orv Silver badge

        There's at least two Fortran compilers for Linux. If you're really unlucky you'll have both. (Unlucky because they have different ABIs, and dynamic libraries based on one will crash when used with the other.)

      2. This post has been deleted by its author

        1. jake Silver badge

          No. I meant what I typed.

          $ file /usr/bin/fortran

          /usr/bin/fortran: symbolic link to gfortran-gcc-7.3.0

          Is Ubuntu really so broken that they don't include that link by default?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "[...] without any loss of accuracy."

    Fortran programs are notorious for producing different results from the same data when you change something.

    In the "old days" different computer models had different precisions for floating point. Even with the same number of bits for mantissa and exponent there could be different ways for the hardware to perform a single operation.

    The same applies to the software - change the order in which parts of a calculation are performed and the intermediate rounding can change the end result.

    Do "industry standards" eliminate those problems - especially for programs that may have originated before such standards were set?

    The first "live" program I wrote was a floating point emulator to test the results of a prototype mainframe. That taught me that unless you copied the hardware microcode ogic exactly then the results did not always match in marginal conditions.

    On an earlier model - a customer did designs for turbine blades. As they were not done very often there was a precautionary practice of repeating the last data set as a benchmark. One day the results didn't match and it was assumed there was a subtle problem with the computer. To everyone's surprise it was the previous results that had been wrong.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Accuracy and industry standards

      Do "industry standards" eliminate those problems - especially for programs that may have originated before such standards were set?

      To a degree, yes. In particular, IEEE-754 is a great solace to anybody performing numerical math. The careful design of the Fortran numerical evaluation semantics also helps, as it allows you to specify the evaluation order of your expressions in great detail if this is desired.

      However, all of this only goes so far when you are dealing with intrinsically unstable problems. In particular, CFD is quite notorious for numerical instabilities and tendency to chaotic behaviour - so I suspect that NASA's definition of "no loss of accuracy" is slightly more intelligent than "produces exactly the same outputs given the same inputs".

      1. Chemist

        Re: Accuracy and industry standards

        "However, all of this only goes so far when you are dealing with intrinsically unstable problems. In particular, CFD is quite notorious for numerical instabilities and tendency to chaotic behaviour "

        Well worth the interested reading about Edward Norton Lorenz's experiences with early computers and the 'butterfly effect' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect

      2. bazza Silver badge

        Re: Accuracy and industry standards

        In particular, CFD is quite notorious for numerical instabilities and tendency to chaotic behaviour

        <tease>Isn't that what turbulence is?!?! Sounds highly appropriate for CFD...</tease>

        I'm quite glad to not have had to write a CFD package... they're hard

        1. ArrZarr Silver badge

          Re: Accuracy and industry standards

          Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1831/

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Accuracy and industry standards

            "Obligatory XKCD:"

            Nothing is ever as simple as it appears.

    2. Ian Bush

      Don't quite get why this is particularly a Fortran problem - it's simply a result of floating point maths. In fact to expect bit wise identical results for every compiler/library/etc. combination in complex codes like those discussed here displays some ignorance about the nature of the beast, and that's before we even think about talking about parallelism. And in practice for the performance these guys need your choice of language is Fortran, C or C++, nothing else will cut it however much quiche you eat, and for all 3 the floating point issues are similar.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Ian Bush

        Believe it or not, Fortran does certain things better than other languages due to, amoungst other things, intrinsically supporting complex numbers (& variables) and matricies, and associated operations.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: @Ian Bush

          "[...] intrinsically supporting complex numbers (& variables) [...]"

          Can anyone confirm that the common use of the variable i in loops goes back to Fortran usage?

          IIRC variables named i, j, k were automatically of integer type.

          1. Roland6 Silver badge

            Re: @Ian Bush

            >Can anyone confirm that the common use of the variable i in loops goes back to Fortran usage?

            No, Fortran simply implemented the conventions used by mathematicians, because the Fortran language was largely written by and for mathematicians...

          2. dajames

            Re: @Ian Bush

            IIRC variables named i, j, k were automatically of integer type.

            All variables were implicitly declared. Any name starting with I, J, K, L, M, or N was integer, anything else was float, unless declared otherwise.

            It was common practice, on compilers that supported it, to declare everything to be some unlikely datatype (such as 64-bit boolean) so that mistyped variable names would be picked up by the compiler.

            IMPLICIT LOGICAL*64 (A-Z)

            (please imagine that line indented by 6 spaces, "&nbsp;" doesn't seem to work here)

            Of course ... that's going back a way. Modern Fortran, which isn't quite the oxymoron you might think, doesn't need such tricks.

        2. allthecoolshortnamesweretaken

          Re: @Ian Bush

          The clue is in the name: Formula translator.

          And yes, IMO still the go-to for anything involving matricies. (FEM, anyone?)

      2. naive

        http://web.mit.edu/humor/Computers/real.programmers

        The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the

        programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use FORTRAN.

        Quiche Eaters use PASCAL. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of PASCAL, gave a

        talk once at which he was asked ``How do you pronounce your name?'' He

        replied, ``You can either call me by name, pronouncing it `Veert', or call

        me by value, `Worth'.'' One can tell immediately from this comment that

        Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism

        endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as Implemented in

        the IBM\370 FORTRAN-G and H compilers. Real programmers don't need all

        these abstract concepts to get their jobs done -- they are perfectly happy

        with a keypunch, a FORTRAN IV compiler, ana a beer.

      3. Roland6 Silver badge

        Don't quite get why this is particularly a Fortran problem - it's simply a result of floating point maths.

        You are to some extent right, the problem is fundamentally the floating point maths.

        However, the reason why it is a Fortran problem is typically you use Fortran on problems where the maths is critical because Fortran gives you lots of control over numbers (both integer and floating-point).

        The number handling capabilities of C and C++ are rudimentary in comparison, but that is because these languages (and C specifically) were not intended to be much more than high-level assembly languages. So if you want Fortran like number handling in C you need to build the relevant libraries...

    3. Korev Silver badge
      Boffin

      The notorious (in the UK at least) failure to predict the storm in 1987 was because they only had the compute power to run the simulation once. These days if they run their programme on the same data many times then they can see the storm in about 40% of the runs.

      1. Tom 7

        RE;The notorious (in the UK at least)

        The storm was predicted - it was just not predicted as a hurricane which it wasnt but the press didnt give a fuck about that, I lost some of my roof, cried because I didnt park my car under that tree I knew would come down in a storm. The best bit was walking back from the pub at 2 in the morning into the tooth of the gale and almost being able to touch the pavement standing up!

  7. wolfetone Silver badge
    Paris Hilton

    Why couldn't they just sponsor a new, faster computer instead?

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      $55k would just about be enough to organise the seating round the planning table.

    3. jake Silver badge

      They are working on it.

      See: Pleiades

    4. /dev/null

      Because software that runs 10 times faster than it did before, will run 10 times faster on the new faster computer too.

      1. JimC

        > will run 10 times faster on the new faster computer

        Or, maybe even more to the point, will be able to handle jobs that are ten times more complicated in the same time. It doesn't matter how fast your hardware is, complexity of CFD work can always be increased to overwhelm it, so more efficiency is always beneficial.

        And you know there are always folk who fancy a very different project in their spare time, and if it brings in a few quid that's nice too. Someone who works on high frequency trading might fancy a bit of part time hobby work on a project that actually benefits humanity instead... Or for that matter someone burned out from working on that stuff who is sitting around getting bored.

        1. MJB7

          Re: > will run 10 times faster on the new faster computer

          "Or, maybe even more to the point, will be able to handle jobs that are ten times more complicated in the same time" - err, probably not.

          If you are doing finite element modelling in four dimensions (three space + time), then a factor of 10 will not even allow you to half the mesh size.

  8. Voland's right hand Silver badge

    Plenty of us not in need of walking frames

    For now I do not need a walking frame. I occasionally need wrist, back, ankle or knee support, but it is not because my beard is gray (which it is). It is because I have done something stupid playing sports or working on a DIY project.

    Now, on the subject at hand - there are plenty of other gray (and not so gray) bears like me who can do Fortran and are not in need of a walking frame. The distinction is that we have NOT graduated with CS. Fortran was a necessary evil in doing the numerical methods courses in Chemistry and Physics up to as recent as 10 years ago (maybe still is). Some of this code is now in use in banking, computation of prices for airlines and god knows what else so it is fairly well maintained too.

    However, as far 55k goes - you gotta be kidding, right?

  9. Nick Kew

    $55k is ample ...

    ... to get the story into El Reg, and to get commentards talking.

    I expect most of us here are precisely those commentards who have worked in FORTRAN at some point in our careers. In my case it was back in the '80s and I haven't revisited since.

    There's a lot of software around for which a 10x speed increase for little effort is entirely realistic, even unambitious. Not that I'm going to be tempted to this one: my memories of working with FORTRAN codebases range from nightmare to, at best, neutral.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: $55k is ample ...

      "There's a lot of software around for which a 10x speed increase for little effort is entirely realistic"

      There's lots of code out there where a 10x increase in speed is trivial, but if I had to guess where to find it I wouldn't have picked high performance CFD code from NASA!

      Unless there is a trick like getting it to run on a GPU then this sounds like one hell of a challenge.

  10. Primus Secundus Tertius

    Look at the maths

    I was once asked to look at an aircraft simulator that was supposed to run 20 iterations per second, but the first version took 2 seconds per go. By rearranging the maths I got it going at 10 times per second. No need to resort to assembler.

    So this kind of work needs numerical analysis skills as well as programming skills.

    I am not eligible for this NASA job: (i) I'm a Brit (ii) I'm retired, and would have to be very tempted.

  11. david_kral@hotmail.com

    This is not a good joke

    I'm not 50 yet, but I've learned Fortan in secondary school. What walking frames do you mean? Eventually I would use nordic walking poles.

    1. herman

      Re: This is not a good joke

      Funny - I am over 50 and using a Nordic walking stick...

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Thought you could learn all you needed to be able to program in Fortran from a single library book (or have I been misled by Hollywood again!)

    Alternatively, on the subject of greybeards and $55k ... there's an ancient IBM mainframe in the computer history museum that was donated to them which thye wanted to try to get running again and someone had the idea of getting the IBM retirees newsletter to ask if anyone wanted to volunteer - the museum was astonished to get over 50 responses within days of the newsletter going out and between them they got it all running again. For some greybeards "working on history" is not always a matter of money!

    1. HelpfulJohn

      "For some greybeards "working on history" is not always a matter of money"

      Indeed. I might do some such thing for the fun of it or to help a friend (if I had any) working at the museum.

      It's possible I would do it just for the chance to play on their kit.

      "I wonder how many instances of SET-at-HOME we could run on this one without them noticing?"

      1. jake Silver badge

        The answer to your question is "none".

        Hope this was helpful, John.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    lol at $55K... they make the job sound so important then pay peanuts. maybe they'll get some pensioners to have a go.

  14. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Coat

    I think this needs a good backronym for CODGER

    COde Development by Greybeards to Enhance Responsiveness?

    In fact Project CODGER sounds like it could be an ongoing programme.

    But I'm sure others could do better.

  15. HieronymusBloggs
    Joke

    re: CODGER

    I think they should get a PFY to recode it in Python so it runs 10x slower and then tell them to get a faster supercomputer. That's the "modern" solution isn't it?

    1. Ian Bush

      Re: re: CODGER

      10x? 100x more likely! And that's not a joke.

    2. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Re: re: CODGER

      I think they should get a PFY to recode it in Python so it runs 10x slower and then tell them to get a faster supercomputer. That's the "modern" solution isn't it?

      I'm not sure we should pandas to your prejudice...

  16. Wensleydale Cheese

    "The code's in Fortran – Modern Fortran, to be exact."

    If it's modern Fortran, I suggest a rewrite in Fortran 77, which can be faster* than the new stuff. A lot of Fortran 77 is apparently still about for performance reasons.

    * Obviously depends on the particular problem being solved.

    1. Tom 7

      Re: "The code's in Fortran – Modern Fortran, to be exact."

      I'd guess its more likely that someone with a lot of experience might just be able to spot where in the program accurate speedups can be obtained - modern fortran isn't slower its just easier to do more generic things so people do that rather than partition things properly. A lot of 3d problems can be mostly solved in 8 bit but only a few bits need to be calculated in 64bit and working out which is which can give you an order of magnitude speedup but leave people gibbering at the code cos that's not how it was done in college.

      1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
        Unhappy

        "A lot of 3d problems can be mostly..in 8 bit but only a few bits need to be calculated in 64bit "

        I'd guess being able to separate those sections out, and re-code them in a safe way, are the tricky bits of the task.

        But since I'm not a 'merican it's strictly an academic exercise to me.

        I recall the chapter Steve Connell wrote in "Code Complete" getting to implement the DES on an original spec IBM PC (4MHz) to code a 9600bps data stream at real time rates, and how many times he re-wrote it to get the speed up he needed.

        Personally the first thing I'd do would be to bench mark it so I knew it was working properly to begin with. That way I'd know any errors later on were mine and I could always roll it back to a known good version. I know "It's been running for decades, how can it have bugs in?" I'll leave people who've used CFD codes for decades to answer that one.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "[...] but leave people gibbering at the code cos that's not how it was done in college."

    That suggests the triangle of "speed - cost - maintainability".

    A young friend with a gift for maths - graduated in Theoretical Physics. Couldn't get a job - so did a Masters in Computing. Landed a job as a Java programmer in The City.

    His complaint at Xmas was that he spent too much time supporting other people's applications which had suddenly decided to fail when something changed.

    He has now managed to career shift into the company's real business - and is now an investment manager.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One small catch...

    Their website states: "Since the code is owned by the U.S. government, it has strict export restrictions requiring all challenge participants to be U.S. citizens over the age of 18."

    This is probably nonsense. (I suspect any citizen of a NATO country can look at it.)

    And which version is "Modern Fortran"? The latter ones have all sorts of good stuff (vide wikipedia article on fotran).

    1. Roland6 Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: One small catch...

      Well I was wondering what real access to the source code a challenge participant actually got. As given the small reward pot on offer, obviously NASA don't really value the code. So I'd suggest enterprising challenge participants uploading the source code to github or sourceforge...

      1. Ian Bush

        Re: One small catch...

        Modern Fortran refers to Fortran 90 or later - usually at least Fortran 95 nowadays

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "It's been running for decades, how can it have bugs in?"

    There was a Harry Hargreaves cartoon in the Punch magazine many year ago. It showed a woodpecker handing out a certificate to guarantee almost all bugs had been removed from a tree. When asked why it was not "all bugs" he replied something like "I will need some more business in six months time".

    I bought the original and had it framed for display on my desk in the IT support department.

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Unhappy

      ""I will need some more business in six months time"

      The software-house-as-bug-creation-machine paradigm.

      Not so sure it applies to in house S/W, although I've no idea where this thing comes from. Worst case is it's written by the back end of a 4GL (some of which produced filthy code. GOTO'S TO GOTO'S. Just awful).

      Establishing a known baseline sounds like a desperate waste of time in the days of agile but I'm well aware of just how dumb I can be. Having it means if it all goes pear shaped you can always roll back.

      Medicine would be a very different discipline if the first line of the Hippocratic Oath read "Just start cutting until something looks like it's working"

  20. Graham O'Brien
    Happy

    I did this back then

    And in Fortran on an ICL 2900 series in the 70s, using 4th-order Runge-Kutta equations. It was fun. I did the coding for a friend's Master's project and got very well paid in Chinese food for it. Happy days.

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Pham Nuwen ...

    ... is the man you're looking for. Or any Qeng Ho software archeologist you can find.

  22. aqk
    Big Brother

    "MODERN" Fortran?

    I'm retired. And have a lot of spare time.

    Where can I find this "Modern" Fortran compiler and DL for free?

    Heck, in the old days I used to translate Fortran's object code (IBM 360) into BAL to make it go faster.

    Ahhh... the good ol' disassembly days! Apparently you go to jail for than now.

    1. jake Silver badge

      Re: "MODERN" Fortran?

      Here's a good place to start:

      https://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/

      Which will lead you here, if you are impatient:

      https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortran

      Which will lead you here, if you are very impatient:

      https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries

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