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Comment by bouchard | Hacker News Reader

I understand the lack of appetite for old FORTRAN 77 code, but PRIMA is a modern Fortran implementation.

You only need Python's ctypes module to load the compiled Fortran library thanks to Fortran's iso_c_binding module.

Using f2c as suggested seems like a worse alternative, not a solution.

This reads like the maintainer, mind you a maintainer of scipy, the premier foundational library in numerical python, does not even understand what PRIMA is or what modern fortran is like. I get people are busy, but this shakes my opinion of scipy a little bit. It doesn't take that long to read the readme... It does not reflect well on them.

I've been trying to debug some of scipy's statistics and it's... incomprehensible. I am not impressed. I'll happily take fortran over its growing morass of wierdo boost wrappers.

> Using f2c as suggested seems like a worse alternative, not a solution.

essentially madness.

Modern fortran is quite nice, much nicer than C from a Python programmer's perspective.

> Modern fortran is quite nice, much nicer than C from a Python programmer's perspective.

Totally agree. I hope everyone making comments on Fortran can spend a few minitues reading what modern Fortran is, e.g., by checking

https://fortran-lang.org/en/

I used Fortran 2008 a lot some years ago; initially I wanted to write a C++ wrapper around a Fortran library that seemed useful, but ended up liking the language better than C++ and just did the whole project in it.

I think a lot of people don’t realize that modern Fortran actually supports object-oriented programming and Matlab-style array slicing, and comes with built-in support for e.g. matrices and complex numbers. It even has some features inspired by functional languages, like being able to mark functions as pure (side-effect free). Combined with its general speed, this makes it a pretty nice language for numerical code.

Although for most new users, I think Julia might be a better option than Fortran these days.

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