The forsat code base is a generic set of Fortran modules written to the latest standards of the
language. The code was developed with numerical simulations of both aerospace and health policy
applications in mind.
It can be very difficult to find modern examples of Fortran code that weren't written before I was born and take advantage of modularity, robust documentation, unit testing and object oriented principles. This code will hopefully provide good examples of how it can now be done within the language.
With that being said, there are three remaining issues that make this language a poor choice. It is not an retrospective language, so generic programming is basically impossible. It can't intercept exceptions, so you must either hard stop an application or return an error code that someone might decide to listen to. Third, Fortran remains absolutely pitiful at processing text, so it completely fails in many areas of machine learning, and makes it very difficult to get inputs in and out of simulations.
- First attempted by David C. Stauffer circa 2014 to write some quaternion and vector tools, plus binary file utilities.
- Mostly written by David C. Stauffer in September 2019 based on the existing Python ghap code, and the MATLAB hesat code to see if performance runtimes could be improved.
- Posted by David C. Stauffer in December 2019 to provide an example of what good modern Fortran code might look like with the hope that some of it will be incorporated in Redy in the future.