What Is the Best Fortran 77 IDE for Beginners?

[chris_0101]

Hi everybody,

I am currently enrolled in a course in university based on scientific programming in fortran 77. The issue that I have is that I cannot find a decent IDE for fortran. I have tried multiple other IDE's such as eclipse, netbeans (both requiring additional add-ons) and other stand alone IDE's such as Plato IDE with no luck. The closest thing that I got to a working IDE is microsoft powerstation 4.0 but when I run a program the compiler force closes with an error 0x0. So I am asking if anyone can suggest a Fortran 77 IDE that is easy to use for begginers or if anyone can provide instructions (or a link to an instructions page) to get one of the IDE's I mentioned to work.

Thank you for your help

chris_0101

 

[uart]

You said you'd tried Plato. Was that with the freeware "silverfrost ftn95 personal"? Did it not work or did you just not like it?

 

[chris_0101]

Yes that's the one. The funny thing about the Plato IDE is that it works, its just whenever I type in a sample, such as the hello world program, it says that there is an error with my coding, even though I copied it straight from the net. Something is not working as far as I know.

 

[uart]

I've never noticed any problem with spurious errors. The only issue with the freeware "silverfrost" ftn95 is that it has a small "nag-ware" delay of about 8 seconds.

If you test it again perhaps you could post the error messages here and someone might be about to straighten them out for you. Code examples that you find on the internet are often just snippets and they won't always run "stand alone" (without some other code or definitions).

 

[chris_0101]

The code that I used is shown below:

program hello
print *, "Hello world!"
end program hello

When the compiler of Plato runs the program a red line highlights the second line of code, so I am assuming there is an issue.

 

[AlephZero]

Try
print *, 'Hello world!'

And don't believe everything you find on wikipedia (for example
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Fortran/Hello_world )

 

[bcbwilla]

I am also using Fortran 77, for a computational physics course. We mainly create our programs using vi.

So yes, if anyone can suggest a good Fortran IDE, that would be helpful.

 

[uart]

The code that I used is shown below:

program hello
print *, "Hello world!"
end program hello

When the compiler of Plato runs the program a red line highlights the second line of code, so I am assuming there is an issue.

You're just clicking the wrong button. The green button starts program in the debugger, so it's sitting at the first code-line of the program waiting for you to run or step etc. Use the blue button if you just want to run the program in a normal manner from within the IDE. Alternatively you could run the exe file directly from a command prompt, or by double clicking the exe file.

See attachment.

 

[PICsmith]

I am currently enrolled in a course in university based on scientific programming in fortran 77. The issue that I have is that I cannot find a decent IDE for fortran.

Why bother with an IDE at all? They're great for large programs, but for the small programs you'll be making in a single semester course, and even for the small to medium sized programs that make up most of scientific computing, I think the way to go is a command line compiler like gfortran and a simple text editor with syntax highlighting (and while vi and emacs are wonderful editors for those already experienced in using them, I wouldn't recommend them just for a course due to the learning curve).

Learning to compile and link in the terminal (or to create a basic makefile) and to use a command line debugger like GDB is fairly simple (not much harder than learning how to use the same features of an IDE), and they are something you'll probably use after you've completed the class if you ever have to write programs again, in any language, whereas you'll probably never use that particular Fortran-specific IDE again.