Re: Objective-Fortran
Re: Objective-Fortran
- Subject: Re: Objective-Fortran
- From: Philippe Mougin <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 21:53:00 +0200
From: Drew McCormack <email@hidden>
To: email@hidden
I am a scientist, and for efficiency and legacy reasons, spend most of
my time programming in FORTRAN. But having gotten interested in OO and
Obj-C, I wish I had similar extensions to FORTRAN. I have worked with
C++ and Java, but in my view, Obj-C is the most elegant OO
implementation I have seen in the "C" family. It's even easy enough to
teach a stupid scientist, which I don't think you can really say for C++
(Java is easy enough too, but the performance is just not good enough).
Note that Fortran 200x (implementations should appears around 2005) will
support object-oriented programming.
I did an internet search which revealed NeXT was developing
objective-Fortran. Does anyone know if such a thing still exists? Where
I could find it?
It was an Absoft product in the 90's, but it is no more sold.
(Historical note: At that time people also talked about projects like
Objective-Cobol and Objective-Ada. I don't know if this materialized).
We used Absoft Objective-Fortran to port a large Fortran 77 application
to NEXTSTEP. It was an incredible, wonderful product, with great
potential. It sported an Objective-C like syntax for calling object or
creating classes. The great thing was that it was compatible with the
Objective-C object system and thus it enabled to freely use the NEXTSTEP
Kits, notably the AppKit, within Fortran code.
I asked Absoft last year about their plans for a version of Obj-Fortran
on Mac OS X. Here is what they answered at that time:
"We will not be offering an object Fortran because that required
integration with Objective C and Apple seems to want to make that go
away. However, we will support the Apple toolbox and Apple will provide
interface building tools."
-Phil
http://www.fscript.org