Part 1. How to get, and use, a Fortran compiler

(c) 2017 by Barton Paul Levenson

There are several free Fortran compilers you can get. For my money, the best is Silverfrost F95 Personal Edition. You can download it here.

It comes with its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The IDE's name is PLATO. It lets you text-edit, compile, and run programs from the same window.

Here's a screen shot of Plato when it first comes up:

If you click that little yellow "sheet of paper" icon at the upper left, just under the File menu, it will offer to create any of a number of types of file for you to work on:

I almost always go with the one at upper left, "Free format Fortran file." Do that and it creates the file for you. Usually the default location is your Documents folder.

I'll write a very simple program to show how to compile and run it. Type at the upper left:

program demo
    write (*, *) 'Hi!'
end program demo

Save the file by clicking File, followed by Save As, and enter demo.f95 as the file name. Click OK, and the yellow tab will change, showing the new name.

Now. See the long row of obscure symbols along the top to the right? The fifth from the right is a blue triangle, pointing right. Here's a close-up:

Click that. You'll get this message:

Click Yes. Your window will show a subwindow at the bottom where you get messages about how the compile and build goes. Then a Windows console window will open up:

Congratulations! You have written and run a FORTRAN program. There is now a demo.exe file sitting in your Documents folder, and you can click and run it at any time.

Now to learn about the language.