Status of gfortran?

[Michael Crawford]

>> ask about in on a high energy physics list, or a HEP google group.
>> particle physicists are heavily into fortran.
>
>
> Speaking as one, we used to use F77, years back, but these days we mostly
> use C++.

Praise the Lord.

I dropped out of my UCSC Physics degree in 1987 to work in industry
for a few years, but eventually completed it with my Senior Thesis at
CERN during the Summer of 1993.  I was appalled at CERNLIB, Patchy and
friends.  I asked my advisor, Clem Heusch, why they didn't hire
professional software engineers to write all that code.  "Students
need jobs," he replied.

I required seven weeks to make sense of my collaborations code and
their tools, three or four days to write my own patchy patch, then
four days to run my Monte Carlo simulation.  After I was all done I
had all of the the graduate students and postdocs look at my source -
I was the only undergraduate.

They were dumbfounded at the pristine, readible clarity of my source -
despite being fortran.

"The reason physics software is so difficult," I angrily told them
all, "IS THAT YOU PHYSICISTS MAKE IT DIFFICULT!"

Thine In Eternal Torment,

Mike