Object Oriented Programming via Fortran 90

Object Oriented Programming via Fortran 90 Keywords object-oriented, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, Fortran 90 Abstract There is a widely available object-oriented (OO) programming language that is usually overlooked in the OO Analysis, OO Design, OO Programming literature. It was designed with most of the features of languages like C++, Eiffel, and Smalltalk. It has extensive and efficient numerical abilities including concise array and matrix handling, like Matlab®. In addition, it is readily extended to massively parallel machines and is backed by an international ISO and ANSI standard. The language is Fortran 90 (and Fortran 95). When the explosion of books and...
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Object Oriented Programming via Fortran 90 Object Oriented Programming via Fortran 90 (Preprint: Engineering Computations, v. 16, n. 1, pp. 26-48, 1999) J. E. Akin Rice University, MEMS Dept. Houston, TX 77005-1892 Keywords object-oriented, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, Fortran 90 Abstract There is a widely available object-oriented (OO) programming language that is usually overlooked in the OO Analysis, OO Design, OO Programming literature. It was designed with most of the features of languages like C++, Eiffel, and Smalltalk. It has extensive and efficient numerical abilities including concise array and matrix handling, like Matlab®. In addition, it is readily extended to massively parallel machines and is backed by an international ISO and ANSI standard. The language is Fortran 90 (and Fortran 95). When the explosion of books and articles on OOP began appearing in the early 1990s many of them correctly disparaged Fortran 77 (F77) for its lack of object oriented abilities and data structures. However, then and now many authors fail to realize that the then new Fortran 90 (F90) standard established a well planned object oriented programming language while maintaining a full backward compatibility with the old F77 standard. F90 offers strong typing, encapsulation, inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, and other features important to object oriented programming. This paper will illustrate several of these features that are important to engineering computation using OOP.1. Introduction The use of Object Oriented (OO) design and Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is becoming increasingly popular (Coad, 1991; Filho, 1991; Rumbaugh, 1991), and today there are more than 100 OO languages. Thus, it is useful to have an introductory understanding of OOP and some of the programming features of OO languages. You can develop OO software in any high level language, like C or Pascal. However, newer languages such as Ada, C++, and F90 have enhanced features that make OOP much more natural, practical, and maintainable. C++ appeared before F90 and currently, is probably the most popular OOP language, yet F90 was clearly designed to have almost all of the abilities of C++ (Adams, 1992; Barton, 1994). However, rather than study the new standards many authors simply refer to the two decades old F77 standard and declare that Fortran can not be used for OOP. Here we will try to overcome that misinformed point of view.Copyright © 1999, 2000 J. E. Akin. All rights reserved. Page 1 of 23 Object Oriented Programming via Fortran 90 Modern OO languages provide the programmer with three capabilities that improve and simplify the design of such programs: encapsulation, inheritance, and polymorphism (or generic functionality). Related topics involve objects, classes, and data hiding. An object combines various classical data types into a set that defines a new variable type, or structure. A class unifies the new entity types and supporting data that represents its status with subprograms (functions and subroutines) that access and/or modify those data. Every object created from a class, by providing the necessary data, is called an instance of the class. In older languages like C and F77, the data and functions are separate entities. An OO language provides a way to couple or encapsulate the data and its functions into a unified entity. This is a more natural way to model real-world entities which have both data and functionality. The encapsulation is done with a module block in F90, and with a class block in C++. This encapsulation also includes a mechanism whereby some or all of the data and supporting subprograms can be hidden from the user. The accessibility of the specifications and subprograms of a class is usually controlled by optional public and private qualifiers. Data hiding allows one the means to protect information in one part of a program from access, and especially from being changed in other parts of the program. In C++ the default is that data and functions are private unless declared public, while F90 makes the opposite choice for its default protection mode. In a F90 module it is the contains statement that, among other things, couples the data, s ...