RAL-TR-2008-002

State of the Art in Object Oriented Programming with Fortran

D.J. Worth

4 January 2008

Abstract:

To define the ``state of the art'' in object oriented (OO) programming with Fortran we bring together a number of disparate resources and try to distill from them recommendations for an OO approach. We begin by defining what the author means by ``object oriented'' and give details of the particular context in which this paper is set. With this background in place we present a survey of tools and techniques (including the Fortran 2003 standard) that allow Fortran programmers to develop their software in an object oriented way. The thorny question of whether efficiency must be sacrificed with object orientation is tackled later in the paper showing that some key elements of OO design can be used successfully with the right compiler.