Python and Fortran

2008 Oct 17 at 09:14 » Tagged as :python,

I was quite surprised to learn that python does not use curly braces in the same manner that most other programming languages do - instead it relies on the levels of indentation to identify code blocks. The last time I had seen something like that was when I was using FORTRAN back in 1999.

At the time, I was still in university and was working on my research project (Quantum Mechanics), I had never learnt fortran before and my attempts to persuade my lecturer to use C++ didn't quite work out. In the end I had to admit that he was right because Fortran was head and shoulders above everything else when it comes to working with complex numbers. Of the languages that I looked at only Fortran had complex numbers as a primitive data type and the other end C++ mostly relied on operator overloading.

I have forgotten most of it but I am pretty sure that It will all come back if I ever decide to do a Phd. In the meantime, it's going to help me learn python.