See the first section of this page for current binary distributions of the GNU compilers for Mac OS X, including gfortran.
You have to register (for free) as an Apple developer then you should be able to access and install XCode on your Mac. I believe gfortran can be installed like any other GNU package under Linux.įor Macs, you have to first install Apple’s XCode distribution that provides developer (programmer) support. There is another widely used free Fortran compiler called g77, but to my knowledge it does not support Fortran 90. While there are excellent commercial compilers from the Portland Group and from Intel, my own preference is for open source solutions, so I use gfortran, which is free and supports Fortran 90. In order to use Fortran, you have to have a Fortran compiler installed on your machine. That said, if numerical speed is what you’re after, a compiled numerically-oriented language like Fortran is just what the doctor ordered. It’s also a lower level language in that it doesn’t have built-in functions to do complex tasks.
The newer dialect Fortran 90 (or, with minor enhancements, Fortran 95) is considerably more modern and versatile, and there’s no reason that I know of to shun it, especially given the huge body of existing Fortran code that is still out there for a wide range of numerical tasks.Ībout the only major gripe I have with Fortran is that it has no built-in facility for graphic output, unlike Python, IDL, MatLab, etc. But this reputation is largely based on Fortran 77, which is indeed archaic and is still found in wide use. Almost every major model in atmospheric and oceanic science is still written in Fortran, to my knowledge.Īmong computer scientists, Fortran has a reputation for being hopelessly out of date, and for that reason it’s hard to find courses that teach Fortran anymore. Fortran has long been the language of choice for numerically intensive computing, including numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, climate models, and other fluid dynamic simulations.