These last few days, I am smiling when I read Profox : I thought I was the only 'Foxil' still working with Foxpro DOS (I have an app working on a Compaq PC that is 23 years old !) and I am an 'expert' of FORTRAN : when I was in university it was one the few languages available (with COBOL and a little later C).
I still work with FORTRAN : one of my client is EDF (French national Electricity Delivery). They where building simulations with 'R' (A new language easy to use but .... slow). As a test, I translate one of them to FORTRAN : running time went from 20 minutes to less than 3 seconds (on a multicore machine with FORTRAN MPI). Since then, I translate a lot and they began to build large simulations (one hour of FORTRAN !).
I have two drawbacks : - I can't 'teach' the new scientists that working with integer is a lot quicker than working with real numbers - the FORTRAN exe run in a 'dos window' within Windows XP and I have no access to the energy saver parameters. So, after 15 minutes, the PC goes to stand by mode because Windows is not able to detect that a 'DOS' exe is running. So I bought a 'rotating fan', fixed the mouse on it so it moves continously right and left and ... windows stay 'alive' !!
The Foxil