Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C

[Chris Collins]

In article <1024 at sdrc.UUCP> spabdul at sdrc.UUCP (abdul shammaa) writes:
>
>How do you convince your managment that it's time to throw away the
>ancient FORTRAN 4 when there are thousands and thousands of lines of that
>crap :-( ?! 
>        Well, because as the upper managment puts it "Our software
>has to run on so many hardware platforms".  
>
>May be changing to "C", "C++", or any other civilized programming language
>is impossible at this stage of the game.  Or, is it?  What do you think?
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>uunet!sdrc!spabdul

My organization is in the midst of going thourgh just this painful process,
of replacing our existing base of 500000 or so lines of Fortran with 
C software.  The only way to convince management was to keep pointing out
that the old software just can't be maintained or modified as easily as
C software.  Eventually it will, if it hasn't already, hit them in the
pocketbook.  
 
If you can, begin by converting only portions at a time.  This was 
partially the approach we took, by first replacing underlying libraries,
then moving on to application/user level code.  We're by no means done,
but once we got started, improvements began to be requested and made by
management.  We've made significant changes for the better in the 
philosophy of our software.  Some of this was market driven, of course,
but much of it was architecture/ease of development/taking advantage of
C capabilities type stuff.  

For portability, C code can be easily be as portable as Fortran, and usually
is much more portable.  Our Fortran software contained it's own bootstrapped
preprocessor, which was okay but not at all as powerful as the C preprocessor.

You could also point out that the best programmers are not going to be
interested in Fortran programmers, and it will drive away current employees
(like yourself) too.

Chris Collins