The State of Fortran Generics

I just returned from the joint WG5/J3 meeting (the international and US committees in charge of producing the next revision to the Fortran standard). The Generics subgroup, of which I am a contributing member, had a very successful showing. The committee discussed and passed 4 "Specification" papers regarding the template feature slated for inclusion in …

A What Test?

We all know what happens when you make assumptions. Of course, when things are obvious to ourselves, we tend not to notice the possibility they may not be obvious to others. Mea culpa, I made exactly that mistake recently. But in my aspirations to teach software development, that provides me with a great opportunity. I …

Which kinds are real?

A discussion starting on the Fortran Discourse, got me thinking about how Fortran libraries should support multiple kinds of floating point numbers? I immediately recalled Dr. Fortran's blog post, but that didn't really consider the idea from a library developer's perspective, just a standalone application developer. That's understandable since at that time there wasn't an …

Setting Up Windows Fortran Development

If you're just getting started with Fortran and your primary computer is Windows, figuring out how to get everything you need installed and configured can be a bit tricky. In this post I'll provide links and some details for how I set up a Windows machine for doing Fortran development. Your mileage may of course …

A Model For Parallel Testing In Fortran

The other day, a friend of mine and I were working together to add some tests to a library of utilities he wanted to put together. He was keen to get some experience with my testing framework, so we decided to do some work on it together. He does a lot of parallel programming, and …

With A Little Help From My Friends

I spent last week at my first Fortran Standards Committee meeting. It was a pretty interesting experience. Everyone there was brilliant, and interested in trying to do a good job improving the language. And yet, it was still somehow very disfunctional. The committee is comprised mainly of representatives from compiler vendors/writers, with a few representatives …

Stick to Your Principles

I've been using Fortran for a long time, but I've only recently started interacting with people trying make changes to the language. It's been a bit of an eye opening experience. I had intuitions about what it would be like and how things happen in language design, but now I've got first hand experience, and …

Kicking And Screaming

How valuable is code that runs fast, but can't be extended or modified? How can you be productive in a code base that's grown into a big ball of mud because that was how you made things fast? How much speed would you be willing to give up in the name of developer happiness and …

Like Miracle Grow For Your Garden

In the last post I did about the Vegetables testing framework I developed, I talked about how much of a success it had been. Now I've cranked it up to 11. I've now got what is effectively QuickCheck level functionality implemented in a Fortran testing framework. For anyone not familiar with QuickCheck, it is effectively …

The Power of a Testing Framework

I am now ready to call Vegetables a huge success. In my last post I discussed its design and construction. I am now using it in a project at work. The power and convenience it has brought us is huge. The design of Vegetables is such that its use highly encourages writing your tests in a …