Well a day or two ago someone asked me what is the scope of the programming language FORTRAN! He was asking the question in light of the dot.NET, AJAX and other hi-fi technologies that you here so much about in every street and in every newspaper ad!!! Well as said earlier the application of this language is still relevant and in aerospace which is considered and is a very specialized stream of engineering, it heavily relies on the FORTRAN codes developed as the technical know-how increased. It is estimated that over 95% of all engineering code developed in the past is written in the FORTRAN Language. Much of that was also developed and is still operational on non-windows operating systems. This important legacy code for the most part is valuable validated code, which many times is still used on a day-to-day basis. The cost to convert this code into another language and operating system would be very expensive. So in light of all these i think my friend will be in a position to ascertain the "scope" of FORTRAN!!!
PS: ANSYS’s computational kernel and MSC NASTRAN, a structural analysis tool, as far as I understand are written in FORTRAN.
