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Comment by xioxox | Hacker News Reader

Do they have libraries for JSON, network functions, strings, data types (e.g. dict/map, resizeable vector, sorting, linked list, kd-tree...), databases, and all the things that make a programming language useful? Please point me to the library. I'm only aware of numerics.

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They have the libraries that make sense for the people that are willing to pay for commercial compilers, in the contexts that Fortran gets used for.

I also don't expect e.g. Ruby to have libraries for AAA game engines, or Erlang to have numeric libraries.

I guess that's a no then. Well, I better give up on Fortran if I need to load configuration files, sort data, expand an array, take command line parameters, associate some text with the data, or use a hash table, if those aren't reasonable features. Apparently, it's only acceptable to use fortran to load some matrix, process it, then spit something out into a file.

Most of the fortran codes I'm working on would be much simpler with a common libraries to do things like that.

It is a no if you are not willing to put the money into it.

There is a cottage industry that actually do just that: create a wrapper program with nice gui to prepare data file input and read/visualize data file output from an open source fortran model. For example, aermod is an open source air pollutant dispersion model developed by EPA and there are a bunch of commercial GUI wrapper for it because (as you note it) you can't expect scientists without computer science background to compile, prepare data and parse the output of a fortran program. Those thing are hard to do in fortran as a programmer, let alone as a scientist without computer science background.

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