A geeky intro into Fortran

On the 9th of  November I organised another local coding meetup. This time we got an introduction Introduction to Fortran and Forth in order to understand some of the origins of programming.

Our resident CompSci member Benson prepared and presented the materials and gave us a glance onto these two arcane, almost ancient programming languages. Yet Fortran is still very much alive and used in a variety of high-performance computing (HPC) scenarios.

You can use command line and a simple text editor (vi, emacs, nano, gedit, atom, notepad++, kate). For the faint-hearted Atom ( https://atom.io/ ) has most of the features we needed for this session, is open and cross platform.

Links to Fortran language standard and tutorial:

• Standards committee: https://wg5-fortran.org/
• Tutorial: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran_77_Tutorial

While Benson prepared a preconfigured VM for us, you can try out Fortran with a Gnu Fortran GCC installed by yourself, and maybe even Eclipse Fortran IDE:

• https://www.eclipse.org/ptp/
• https://www.eclipse.org/photran/

Links to Forth language standard and tutorial:

• Standard: https://forth-standard.org/
• Tutorial: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/gforth/Docs-html/
• Example simple interpreter: https://github.com/howerj/libforth
• Example interpreter for educational purposes: https://github.com/sayon/forthress

The materials are also collated on my GitHub account again. Happy coding :-)