All About F^TM

F is a trademark of The Fortran Company.

What is F?

F is a carefully crafted subset of the most recent version of Fortran, the world's most powerful numeric language. Teaching F provides two significant advantages:

1. It is widely used outside the educational community, so experience translates into a useful skill in the engineering or business world.
2. Programming in other popular languages is complicated and difficult for the beginner to grasp.

F retains the modern features of Fortran--modules and data abstraction, for example--but discards facilities such as EQUIVALENCE, which are difficult to teach, use, or debug. It is a safe and portable programming language. F may be used by the Fortran 77 programmer as a transition to the new concepts in Fortran 95. F programs can call Fortran 77 programs, so legacy codes can be used with new codes written in F. F is a new programming language with a past and a future.

On the other hand, the current implementations of F have some special additional features, such as the ability to access command arguments and environment variables, the ability to call system to execute an operating system command, and some Fortran 2003 features.

F encourages Module-Oriented Programming. "An F module is easy to code and understand. Compared to object-oriented programming, module-oriented programming has all the reuse without all the abuse," says David Epstein.

Back to the F home page

Questions or Comments?