Intro to modern Fortran

Course Overview

This 5-day course provides a comprehensive introduction to the key features of modern Fortran including the Fortran base types, arithmetic, precision, arrays and whole array features, I/O, control structures, intrinsic and user defined functions, subroutines, modules, pointers and simple data structuring.

The course builds to provide a solid foundation of skills to start working with existing codes and to progress to the more advanced course.

The course is a mixture of lectures and practical sessions and on completion delegates should be able to work with most existing codes.

Fortran is the main language for numeric computation, especially high performance computing and over 80% of the workload on the UK's academic research supercomputers is written in Fortran.

The course is suitable for both complete beginners and people with some programming background.

Pre-requisites

Delegates should be comfortable with using a computer system running Unix, Linux or Windows and a text editor.

Course details

Introduction to problem solving

Introduction to programming languages

Introduction to programming

Introduction to arithmetic

 

Real and Integer data types

 

Rules for computer arithmetic

 

​Finite precision and implications for computer arithmetic

Arrays

basic array syntax

 

one and multidimensional arrays

 

dynamic arrays - allocatable attribute

 

whole array processing

 

array sections

 

array element ordering

I/O

numeric edit descriptors

input and output of reals and integers

character/ text data

Files

file access - open and close statements

 

speed of access - text versus binary files

 

records

 

handling errors

Functions

the first of the two fundamental Fortran building blocks

 

intrinsic functions

 

user defined functions

 

scope of variable

 

internal functions

 

pure and elemental functions

 

functions and modules

Control Structures

complete coverage of Fortran control structures

Character variables

character/ text data in Fortran

 

Fortran's character functions

Fortran's other basic data types

complex

 

logical

Introduction to derived types

Introduction to pointers

Subroutines

Fortran's remaining building block

 

modules and subroutines

 

passing parameters in Fortran

 

passing scalar and array parameters

 

automatic and allocatable arrays

 

keyword and optional arguments

 

internal subroutines and scope

 

commercial numerical and statistical subroutine libraries

Modules

Fortran's code organisation mechanism

 

basic module syntax

 

modules for global data

 

modules for precision specification and constant definition

 

modules for derived types

 

implicit and explicit interfaces

Introduction to data structuring with examples

singly linked list: reading an unknown amount of data

 

reading in an arbitrary number of reals using a linked list and copying to an array

 

ragged arrays

 

ragged arrays and variable sized data sets

 

perfectly balanced tree

 

date class

 

date data type with USA and ISO support

 

Course material

The course is based on Introduction to programming with Fortran (4th edition)

program examples from 4th edition book (text files)

Examples as a tar file for Linux/Unix/Windows users (updated 2/9/18)

For more information please contact queries@fortranplus.co.uk