[avg_freeper]

"I still get drawn into reverse engineering someone's FORTRAN mess from time to time, but only the only good reason for using FORTRAN anymore is job security, no one else will ever want to "own" your code"

When I start delving into a new FORTRAN code I grep for # of occurrences of GOTO and then divide that number by line count. That forms my cr_ppyness percent (CRP).

Anything above 0% CRP is bad. Fortran 90 never really caught on at least where I work. I still have to deal with a lot of Fortran 66 with arithmatic ifs etc. as if 77 isn't bad enough.

But our new employees over the past five years are experienced in Matlab and that is the direction we're trending. There is a reluctance to go with a proprietary language though.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

There is a reluctance to go with a proprietary language [matlab] though.

It's better than Excel, with matlab at least, when you buy the application, you own it. Also, Mathworks sells matlab to ANSII C "compilers". I've written functions in matlab in a day that would take weeks (or more) to code and unit test in C.