Fortran for Mac OS?

chemistry_geek

chemistry_geek

Registered
Does anyone know if Fortran exists for the Mac OS? I don't care whether its for Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X. I'm working on a project for my masters thesis and a professor gave me a book with some fortran programs that will help me, BUT I need fortran to do it. I did a search with Sherlock and I found the 2nd edition of the book online. For anyone out there who might want this book (useful for programming), the entire book "Numerical Recipes, The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd Edition" can be downloaded in PDF & PostScript format for FREE (yes, it's legal) at this address:

http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Numerical_Recipes/

According to the licence agreement, you are entitled to print ONE copy for yourself.

The book comes in 2 flavors: programs written in C, and programs written in Fortran77 and Fortran90. I downloaded them all (never know when something like this will be useful). The Fortran90 book is the 2nd volume in the series.

chemistry_geek
 
ummm...is fortran still used ?
Seems like an arcaic language, (Yes I know it can do lots of math crunching)
 
Haven't used it myself, but another thread by gkhanna mentions he/she ported g77 to OS X.

And I guess it's a good thing I bought that book years ago, otherwise I might be upset at now getting it free...
 
Yes, FORTRAN is still very popular among scientists. Believe it or not
(at least in my experience) it is still incredibly fast compared to modern
programming languages.

Anyway .. I have g77 for Mac OS X off my website. You are welcome to
give it a try .. I also have other useful tools for science.

http://floyd.liunet.edu/~gkhanna/hpc.html
 
I would like to thank you all for replying to my post and helping me. I would like to especially thank gkhanna for the link allowing me to download fortran 77. I will certainly need some help getting it installed and running.

chemistry_geek
 
I was wondering why you couldn'y use the book thazt comes in the c language flavor, since you could compile in osx natively with that language.:confused:
 
squirell1357,

I have a very limited knowledge of programming. I only know how to program in four languages: BASIC, HP48 LISP, MATLAB (which is supposed to be similar to FORTRAN), and WordPerfect 5.1 Macro language. Unfortunately, none of these are considered "mainstream".

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 with 2K of RAM, 8K of ROM. It used BASIC as the user programming language. My next computer was a Timex Sinclair 2068 with color!, 48K of RAM, and I think 32K of ROM (maybe had more). It was an Americanized version of the Sinclair Spectrum. My next computer was the very first and original Apple IIgs Woz Limited Edition. I still have all these computers, they all work, and they all use a version of BASIC.

Being a chemistry major, I was encouraged to take as many math classes as I could squeeze in my undergraduate education. My last class was a full year of Numerical Analysis in which I was taught to program in MATLAB. I learned more math in that class than all of my undergraduate math classes combined. MATLAB uses all of the "libraries" of FORTRAN, so numerically, MATLAB is KING of math programs for numerical computation. I don't think it does symbolic computations without hacks and add-ins. As far as accuaracy, MATLAB uses LINPACK (as does the Hewlett Packard HP48); it doesn't have round-off error in its answers/results. There's a reason MATLAB costs thousands of dollars. It runs on Macs, PC's, and mainframes.

All I know is that FORTRAN is used by many scientists through out the world, and looking through the book, the code looks an aweful lot like MATLAB which is what I understand.

All I need to do is smooth a few UV-vis spectra that were obtained near the instrument's detection limit, hence the data is jagged and noisy. I just want to smooth out the noise and I found a routine that uses the Fast Fourier Transform to remove the higher frequency noise. Hell, I might even be able to implement it in MATLAB or my HP48 if I can translate the code.

If anyone would like a nice calculator program for their Mac, get X48. The latest version can be found on Apple's Mac OS X download page under mathematics. It's also available on www.versiontracker.com as well as www.macosxapps.com. This is a fullblown HP48 emulator and it is really good. I would recommend any science major to purchase one from Hewlett Packard. It may not be as fast as the new Texas Instruments calculators, but it gives numerically more accurate answers and the programming language, HP LISP, is really quite powerful. There are some really neat programs for it at www.hpcalc.org.

chemistry_geek
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top