I've been challenged to learn fortran so I've decided to take on the challenge.

I've been using the book "Modern Fortran Explained" by Michael Metcalf, John Reid, and Malcolm Cohen as a guide. And of course the website Fortran. Which is also an amazing source. Taught me about variables, printing, reading input, etc... Fortran from what I've seen is a very simple and easy language to learn. Its hella readable.

Lets do some explaining I guess.

So in Fortran you gotta have a program like below

program hello
    print *, "Hello, World!"
end program hello

So the program keyword is used to start a program similar to how def and main are used in python and c respectively. The print keyword is used to print to the console. The * is used somewhat like parenthesis. The end program keyword is used to end the program.

You can compile this using gfortran -o hello hello.f90 and run it using hello.exe. Make sure you have GNU/Mingw installed.

I've also learned about variables. You can declare variables like so

program variables
    integer :: a
    real :: b
    character(len=10) :: c
    a = 5
    b = 5.5
    c = "Hello"
    print *, a
    print *, b
    print *, c
end program variables

As you can see it's really readable and simple. I don't know why people are scared to learn new languages that are old. Not all old languages are hard. Just takes a decent teacher/or online resource.

Anyways, here's the resources I used for learning Fortran.

• Fortran
• GNU Fortran