Fortran

Finally, we approach the home stretch. Here’s how the output of our program appears: From this table, we can see which city has the highest score for each respective variable. For example, Miami (MIA) is the warmest but also the most humid city in the group, yielding scores of 1 and 0 for temperature and […]

At this point, we have our specific procedures implemented. Now we need to define the interface such that we can simply invoke average(temperature), average(wind_speed), and so on, rather than having to match the data types, like average_real(temperature), average_int(wind_speed), and so on. To do so, we’ll open an interface block at the top of the module, before the contains statement, that will […]

In this subsection, we’ll implement all three specific functions, one for each data type that we intend to parse: integer, real, and logical. We’ll need the following specific functions: Let’s write the first specific function, which will operate on real arrays. Note that we already wrote this function in section 5.3, when analyzing stock price time series. The real implementation […]

In the previous section, we learned that Fortran’s strong typing discipline prohibits passing arguments of incompatible data types to procedures. This means that when you write a function that expects a real number as input, you can’t simply pass an integer as an input argument. This would trigger a compile-time error. You can see this […]

In this section, you’ll learn how generic procedures work, how to implement them, and how to apply them to data of different data types. We’ll start by identifying the problem with strong typing, as we attempt to pass data of one type to a procedure that expects a different type.

Static and strong typing are often confused and used interchangeably. However, they describe two different properties of a programming language. A statically typed language assumes that all variables must have either a manifestly declared data type (like in Fortran or C) or a data type inferred from their use (like in Julia, Nim, or Rust) at compile time. […]

Before jumping into writing our first generic procedure, let’s briefly introduce a few new concepts that will get us there: Although Fortran is both statically and strongly typed, don’t confuse the two. I’ll explain the difference in the following subsection.

To find the city with the optimal climate, we’ll go through the following steps: Sounds easy, right? We covered most of the logistics around reading and processing time series data in chapters 5 and 7. Here, we’ll focus on implementing the generic average function that can operate on integer, real, or logical data.

As I said earlier, we’re looking to parse weather data to identify the city with the most pleasant climate (average weather). What is the most pleasant climate? The answer will likely vary depending on who you ask, but for me, that means To be fair, these are quite crude and arbitrary criteria, but they will […]

The dataset that we’ll work in this chapter is based on weather data collected at automated ground stations all over the world and gathered every hour to a central database. The specific weather parameters, their units, and their data types are summarized in table 9.1. Table 9.1 Variables and their units and data types in […]