Giggly young Michelle dropped by my office last week to ask about FORTRAN compilers and the IMSL math library, since the faculty and grad students here are under the (somewhat mistaken) impression that I’m some sort of computer wizard. Not having touched FORTRAN in 9 or 10 years, I allowed as how I’d have to do some research, but maybe I had an old compiler laying around that might be useful.
Two days and a lot of hacking later, this is what I’ve found:
- my old Microsoft FORTRAN PowerStation 1.0a is more obsolete than the slide rule;
- IMSL is out there, but it ain’t cheap;
- Watcom stopped selling their FORTRAN package, and made it a FORTRAN/C++ open source product–they suggest a $25 donation before downloading;
- frugal FORTRAN’ers still speak kindly about the old 1966 NSWC Numerical Library, but the hardcopy manual is very hard to find (except in my office!); and
- there’s a ton of other FORTRAN packages available on the web. Apparently we old card-punchers never die, we just terminate abnormally.
However, Dr Keating took pity on Michelle and bought FORTRAN/IMSL package for her work. Nice for Michelle, but it’s a single-seat license. I just ran through the simple tutorial for the FORTRAN IDE, and it seems pretty solid, at least for the basic number-crunching that our statisticians like to do. I recommend the Open Watcom package for the rest of our folks.
The Random Texan 
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