Advice 2

[Arpene]

Hello Guys

I'm a litlle bit concerned about "good practices" on programming in Fortran.
I'm not a professional programmer. I do use Fortran in my work as a tool.
However, I think, I have already gathered a good knowledge about it, so that now I'd like to optimize the way I write my codes.

Is there some specific literature about it? (I mean: how to write a good code?)
Is this an area that doesn't depends on the language you're using?

I'll be very thankfull for any advice or hint that I could receive from you guys.

Thanks in advance.

Artur

 

[mikrom]

Is this an area that doesn't depends on the language you're using?

IMHO it depends of langugage, but mostly of Programming paradigm you are using.
Fortran is a procedural language. When I started to learn programming the good style for procedural languages was called Structured programming.

If you want improve in any programming language, you need the knowledge and experience:
Look at the code written by experienced programmers, try to understand it and learn from them.
Read tutorials, manuals and books about programming.
Practice, writing your own programs.

 

[xwb]

I'd worry more about maintenance and adding debugging and feedback features.

If it takes 5 minutes and a rebuild to increase the array size instead of 5 hours then you've done something right.

Also, from the program output, if you can tell the user what they did wrong, eg matrix ill conditioning, or maybe switch on a flag from the command line or input file to generate more output then that would be useful. The problem is we don't always run in an environment with a debugger or have access to the source code so anything would be useful.

Sometimes it is helpful to put the debug out in CSV format. Pop it into a spreadsheet and you've instantly got something readable without having to format it.

 

[xwb]

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~szymansk/oof90.html

is a good starting point for techniques