GUI: Fortran + Visual Basic
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From: Abbas Fakhari on 9 Mar 2010 02:29 Dear Collegues, I want to generate a software for HVAC calculations in buildings (I am a Mechanical Engineer). So, I decided to have somebody write the GUI part with Visual Basic and me, myself, write the computational and mathematical parts using Fortran. Would you please help me with this! I want to know whether this is a good job or it is better to write both GUI and computational parts with Visual Fortran (as you know, GUI also can be written by Fortran). Reference to any useful tutorial, ebook, etc. is welcome. Thanks in advance!
From: Steve Lionel on 9 Mar 2010 08:43 On 3/9/2010 2:29 AM, Abbas Fakhari wrote: > I want to generate a software for HVAC calculations in buildings (I am > a Mechanical Engineer). So, I decided to have somebody write the GUI > part with Visual Basic and me, myself, write the computational and > mathematical parts using Fortran. > > Would you please help me with this! I want to know whether this is a > good job or it is better to write both GUI and computational parts > with Visual Fortran (as you know, GUI also can be written by Fortran). Many people do this using Intel Visual Fortran and Microsoft Visual Basic. Intel Visual Fortran provides two sample programs mixing VB and Fortran. If the person developing the GUI is more familiar with Visual Basic, then that's a fine choice. If you need help in dealing with the mixed-language issues, feel free to ask questions in our user forum (link below.) -- Steve Lionel Developer Products Division Intel Corporation Nashua, NH For email address, replace "invalid" with "com" User communities for Intel Software Development Products http://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/ Intel Software Development Products Support http://software.intel.com/sites/support/ My Fortran blog http://www.intel.com/software/drfortran
From: dpb on 9 Mar 2010 09:45 Abbas Fakhari wrote: > Dear Collegues, > > I want to generate a software for HVAC calculations in buildings (I am > a Mechanical Engineer). So, I decided to have somebody write the GUI > part with Visual Basic and me, myself, write the computational and > mathematical parts using Fortran. > > Would you please help me with this! I want to know whether this is a > good job or it is better to write both GUI and computational parts > with Visual Fortran (as you know, GUI also can be written by Fortran). .... As Steve L says, it's essentially not a Fortran question at all; it's simply an interface issue between the two languages that is handled/explained by all commercial Windows compilers I've seen pretty well in their users' guides. I don't know about how well the documentation describes mixed-language program w/ MS products for open-source Fortran compilers. I'd simply add one note -- VB is a good choice for the mixture w/ Fortran owing to the similarity in language syntax/style and, more importantly imo, the native array storage order is consistent between the two. Well, ok, two...unless the computational portion of your proposed code is very compute-intensive (as in iterative or very large node sizes or somesuch) you might find that VB is plenty fast enough. There are features of each language that are incentives to use it; more so w/ Fortran if you're using later versions than if you're using F77 or mostly F77 style coding. In going that route you could, however, avoid the mixed-language issues altogether. --
From: Craig Powers on 9 Mar 2010 15:48 dpb wrote: > > I'd simply add one note -- VB is a good choice for the mixture w/ > Fortran owing to the similarity in language syntax/style and, more > importantly imo, the native array storage order is consistent between > the two. That's true of classic VB, certainly... is it still true of Visual Fred? Given all the other C-isms imposed on the language by outsiders in the transition to .NET, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they changed the array storage order as well.
From: dpb on 9 Mar 2010 19:43
Craig Powers wrote: > dpb wrote: >> >> I'd simply add one note -- VB is a good choice for the mixture w/ >> Fortran owing to the similarity in language syntax/style and, more >> importantly imo, the native array storage order is consistent between >> the two. > > That's true of classic VB, certainly... is it still true of Visual Fred? > Given all the other C-isms imposed on the language by outsiders in the > transition to .NET, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they changed the > array storage order as well. Well, Craig, it looks like you're right...not only are they 0-based (and apparently that's immutable as it appears neither Option Base nor explicit subscripting ranges are implemented) the storage order is row-based a la C rather than column-based a la Fortran. On that basis I'm recanting my above recommendation--the benefits wouldn't be worth the trouble imo. As you can tell in that I had to go look it up I've stayed w/ VB5/6 "Classic" and not used .net. Thus I hadn't run into the problem. -- |