FORTRAN 77 ... the dinosaur language?

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Hell, maybe FORTRAN does belong in computing's Jurassic Era but it's still useful for scientific computing. Mainly coz there are huge archives of code available out there.

The downside is that commercial FORTRAN packages are ridiculously expensive. Boy, and how! The cheapest is Lahey's F90 compiler for about $600(?) and from there packages range up to around USD3500. Maybe more -  but I stopped looking after I saw Watford's and Digital Fortran's prices. Lahey used to offer a free compiler for learners like me, but then they withdrew it. One problem with it was that Lahey's was never "shop standard" FORTRAN anyway. People speak highly of the GNU compiler but I could never get the damn thing to work properly.

I found the best, that is to say the cheapest(!), way to learn Fortran 77 is Salford University's free compiler used in conjunction with PFE (the Program File Editor). PFE lets you edit in Windows and opens a DOS window at the click of a tool-bar button. It keeps track of the directories so you don't have to fuss with long path names. That makes editing & testing a breeze. Salford's compiler comes with debugger that works pretty good most of the time : gotta watch out coz  it's inclined to crash my system (Win98) when it detects a bad file access by an F77 test program.

Watford
Digital Fortran
The Fortran Market

PFE : Allan Phillips, Lancaster University Computer Centre : www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe
Lahey Fortran : Lahey
Compaq Fortran Home Page : http://www.compaq.com/fortran/
The FORTRAN Product Directory : http://www.fortran.com/fortran/products.html
The MATRIX Market : http://math.nist.gov/MatrixMarket/
The Numerical Recipes Homepage : http://www.nr.com/
NAG Free Source : http://users.erols.com/dnagle/download.html
FORTRAN Start Page : http://home.wanadoo.nl/veb/fortran/
NCSE : http://stokes.ucsd.edu/c_pozrikidis/ncse/mainpage.html
Numerical Methods for FORTRAN : http://www.camk.edu.pl/~tomek/htmls/num_meth.html
Numerical Recipes Forum : http://www.nr.com/forum/
CYGWIN FORTRAN : http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/
NAG Recipes : http://www.nag.co.uk/nagware/examples.asp
GNU FORTRAN : http://www.gnu.org/software/software.html
The G77 Page : http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~kern/G77/g77.html
More G77 : http://programming.ccp14.ac.uk/g77-fortran/~michael/os2/g77/gnu_fortran.html
Numerical Recipes Group : http://www.nr.com/

Maths Links
http://www.mathtools.net/  : Math Tools (EXCELLENT Site!)
http://netlib.uow.edu.au/ : NetLib
http://www.netlib.org/minpack/index.html : MinPack
http://www.mathcom.com/corpdir/techinfo.mdir/scifaq/index.html : Numerical Analysis
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~ctrans/tomasz.html : Numerical Methods
http://lib.stat.cmu.edu/ : StatLib ..Statistic software
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scilab/scilab.html : SciLab Math Package

FORTRAN 77 for Engineers and Scientists with an Introduction to FORTRAN 90 (4th Edition) by Larry R. Nyhoff, Sanford Leestma

Schaum's Outline of Theory and Problems of Programming With Fortran 77 (Schaum's Outline Series) by William E. Mayo, Martin Cwiakala

The book I'm using is "Structured FORTRAN 77 for Engineeers & Scientists" by D.M. Etter, 2nd. ed. Benjamin/Cummings 1987. ISBN : 0-8053-2495-X. It's probably long since outa print - I picked mine up at a 2nd hand book sale. The following are zipped text files of the examples I've got thru so far + some of my own code problems. Maybe it'll be useful to someone out there? Only don't expect rocket-science programs - these are just my tute files :(  FORTRAN_77_TUTES