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Comment by tus88 | Hacker News Reader

> Fortran never left us... it runs our mainframes today.

What? That's where you lost me.

IIRC, FORTRAN is used heavily in the LINPACK/LAPACK libraries which are further used in higher level libraries such as numpy. So it’s likely true that it still sees use in control software running trains, banks, air traffic control, etc.

It is still heavily used for numerical code in various places, especially aerospace (to avoid reverifying code with new languages or just to ensure new work can be accurately compared with old work)

There's even a CUDA compiler.

As I understand it, lack of pointers makes it possible for fortran compilers to parallelize code quite well.

Fortran does have pointers, though. [1] Maybe they are just not common for most math operations on matrices?

[1] http://www.personal.psu.edu/jhm/f90/lectures/42.html

Multidimensional arrays are first-class in Fortran, so there's no need to use pointers there. There are some rules around pointers and subarrays that I expect make any possible aliasing undefined behaviour.

It has things called pointers, but they are significantly different than pointers in C. They can't return memory addresses and so there's no pointer arithmetic or other difficult to optimize actions.

And after writing a significant amount of fortran 90 code I didn't even know the feature existed...

Dude, my alma mater is still TEACHING 3 or 4 semesters worth of fortran for numerical work.

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