Welcome to the project page. This is page contains information, source code and anything else you can think of for all my on-going projects. You can find links to various resources that I found during my long hours of searching the net. Maybe, just maybe, you'll find something of use here.

The Fortran Adventure Silly as it may sound, I had this great urge of looking into a language called Fortran. If you haven't heard of it, then here is some historical data on it: This language was devised first for an IBM 704 computer, in 1957. It was developed by a group led by John Backus. FORTRAN stands for Formula Tran slation. It was mainly developed to solve mathematical and scientific problems. Fortran was one of the very first high level languages. It has a rich set of control structures and input / output statements. (I was able to create a simple address book application in 2 minutes after trying Fortran for the first time for about 20 minutes !). If you have programmed with BASIC, then, you already know about interpreters and compilers. Fortran is compiled so you get executables which run at blazing speeds. Back to histroy, by 1963, most major computer vendors provided Fortran compilers for their hardware. However, the development of these compilers were not checked so each vendor ended up adding his own proprietary features which started a whole lot of compatibility problems. In 1966, an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard for Fortran was formed. This helped in bringing about some order. 1977, a need was felt for standardizing Fortran even more for sake of source compatibility, thus the Fortran 77 standard was developed. It is in use even today. This standard was later adopted by the ISO. It defined better character/string handling & improved I/O. This made Fortran a great language for programming a wide range of applications. Subsequently, the Fortran 77 standard was replaced by the Fortran 90 standard. However, Fortran 77 never truly died. People all over the world still love and use Fortran 77. Recently, there has been some work going on for developing an object oriented version of Fortran called Fortran 2000. Recenlty, a project called FORCE 2.0 is under development. This project aims at developing a freeware Fortran compiler and editor. They have a full fledged freeware Fortran compiler for download. It also comes with a beautiful editor.  You can read more about it at their hoempage, http://www.forceproject.hpg.com.br I also have spent a few hours trying to download tutorials for Fortran. I must say that good Fortran tutorials are pretty hard to come by, even on the Internet. I have managed to find two great tutorials. They are available here for download: The Professional Programmer's Guide to Fortran 77 by Clive G. Page, University of Leicester, UK This tutorial is actually the digital version of the book which was published by Pitman in 1988. It makes an excellent tutorial. I think this tutorial is all you'll ever need to make great programs in Fortran. Reading this tutorial has taken me to yet another adventure, which is, Adventure of the PostScript. If you use Windows, no doubt, you must have used Microsoft Word atleast once. Word is a pretty good editor. But, Word is not very famous in the academic cirlces where the only words you hear are Unix, Tex, Vi and Emacs ! They use something called PostScript format for creating printable documents. PostScript was developed a long time back, when there was no DOS, by Adobe, famous for their PhotoShop product. Anyway, what I wanted to convey was that the tutorial is in PostScript format so you will not be able to view it right away. You must first download a viewer. Thankfully, some kind souls have developed a great PostScript reading software for Windows. It is called GhostScript. Not only does GhostScript understand PostScript (.ps) files, it can also read PDFs and convert one file format to another and many more things, detials of which I have been unable to explore due to lack of time. You can download GhostScript here: ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/gnu/ Oh yes, another thing, GhostScript has a shell like interface which will take time getting used to, so, you'll also have to download a GUI interface for reading the tutorial. Mercifully, even this is avaibale for free. The software is called GhostView. You can download it at: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gv Well, now that you have the compiler and the tutorial, start writing some exciting Fortran code. If you want to add some comments or experiences with Fortran, please mail me at siddharth_b@yahoo.com Source code for 3 programs are ready for download:  Example #1 Report Print - this program uses simple Input/Output routines to print records from a file. The source code is given below: C NAME : fileio C AUTHOR : Siddharth Barman C DESCRIPTION : Program to read a text file and print records C DATE : 09-05-2002 C/n PROGRAM fileio Character cFile*20 Integer nRecs Character cData*(20) Integer nMarks, nCnt, nP, nC, nM Real rPer Write (*,*) 'Enter the file name with path:' Read (*,*) cFile * Read the number of records from header Open(Unit=1, File=cFile, Status='old') Read(Unit=1, FMT=*) cData, nRecs Write (*,*) 'Mark List' Write (*,*) 'Name Physics Chemistry Maths Total Percent' Write (*,*) '-------------------' Do 10, nCnt=1, nRecs Read(Unit=1, FMT=*) cData, nP, nC, nM nMarks = nP + nC + nM rPer = 1.0 * nMarks / 300 Write (*,*) cData, nP, nC, nM, nMarks, rPer 10 Continue Close(1) End Explanation: The source is actually quite simple to understand. Every FORTRAN program begins with a PROGRAM statement that acts as a way for you to give a name to your program. All lines which begin with a 'c' or a '*' in the first column is treated as a comment. I have used expicit variable declaration which is NOT a necessity in FORTRAN. However, since I come from a C++ background, this comes to me naturally. If you will notice, I have declared cData as Character cData*20. This means that this variable will hold character data (or a string if you may) and the maximum permitable length of the string is 20. Other variable declarations are self-explanatory. In order to write to a file or the screen, FORTRAN makes use of "UNITS" which is specified in the "WRITE" command. Each file can be opened and given a unique number starting from 0. In case you want to write to a standard device i.e. the screen, you can simply say '*' instead of using a number. This is what I have done with the Write (*,*) 'Enter the file name with path:' command. In order to interact with the user, I make use of the "READ" command. This too works on the principle of UNITS. Here the user enters some value by punching in the data using the keyboard. This value is read stored in a variable called cFile. The WRITE and READ commands also allow you to specify the format in which data is written to or read from a device. How to specify the format is shown in the 3rd program that deals with Sorting and Report Printing. In order to read/write to a file stored on the disk or tape, we have to first open a file and assign a UNIT number to it. This is done using the "OPEN" command. Status='OLD' means that the file is already existing in the disk. In case you want to create a new file, then, you must specify STATUS='NEW'. After opening the file, we first read how many records or lines are present in the file by making use of some header data present in the file. This data has to be entered correctly by us while creating this file. You can create this file in Vi or Emacs or Notepad if you are a Windows user. Save it simply as a TEXT file. The data of the file will look something like this: RECORDS, 3 Sid, 78, 92, 81 Mina, 90, 87, 94 Yogi, 78, 80, 88 For iterating through all the lines in the file, we make use of a LOOP. To create a loop, we need a line marker, a counter variable, a start value and an end value. For us, the looping statement is declared as: Do 10, nCnt=1, nRecs Here, 10 is the line-marker, nCnt is the counter variable, 1 is the start value and nRec is the end value. The value of nRecs is what is to be specified in the header of the file i.e. the line RECORDS, 3. Therefore, nRecs will have the value 3. Inside the loop, we simple print out the values are being read and also add up the marks to get the total and print it out. Simple ? I thought so too...  Example #2 Sorting and formatted Report Print with file save - this program uses extensive Input/Output routines, arrays and format specifiers to display a sorted Mark List and store it into a file. The source code is given below: * Program to illustrate usage of Array * This pgogram will ask user to enter marks for n number of students * which will be stored in arrays * This array will then be sorted according to the marks entered * The data will also be saved in a file specified by the user C C NAME : entermarks.f C AUTHOR : Siddharth Barman C DESCRIPTION : As above C DATE : 15-05-2002 C/n PROGRAM Marks INTEGER nStuds, nMaths, nChem, nPhys CHARACTER cName*20 CHARACTER cFile*50 INTEGER aMaths(50), aChem(50), aPhys(50) INTEGER i,j INTEGER nTot1, nTot2, nStat CHARACTER aName(50) * 20 WRITE(*,*) 'Enter the number of students:' READ(*,*) nStuds IF (nStuds .LE. 0) THEN WRITE (*,*) 'Quitting program.' STOP END IF DO 15, nCount=1, nStuds WRITE (*,*) 'Enter marks for student number', nCount WRITE (*,*) 'Student name:' READ (*,*) cName WRITE (*,*) 'Maths:' READ (*,*) nMaths WRITE (*,*) 'Physics:' READ (*,*) nPhys WRITE (*,*) 'Chemistry:' READ (*,*) nChem aName(nCount) = cName aMaths(nCount) = nMaths aChem(nCount) = nChem aPhys(nCount) = nPhys 15 CONTINUE DO 20, i=1, nStuds - 1 DO 30, j=i+1, nStuds nTot1 = aMaths(j) + aPhys(j) + aChem(j) nTot2 = aMaths(i) + aPhys(i) + aChem(i) IF (nTot1 > nTot2) THEN nMaths = aMaths(i) nChem = aChem(i) nPhys = aPhys(i) cName = aName(i) aMaths(i) = aMaths(j) aChem(i) = aChem(j) aPhys(i) = aPhys(j) aName(i) = aName(j) aMaths(j) = nMaths aChem(j) = nChem aPhys(j) = nPhys aName(j) = cName END IF 30 CONTINUE 20 CONTINUE WRITE (*,*) 'Mark Listing' WRITE (*,*) '------------' WRITE (UNIT=*, FMT=99) DO 40, i=1, nStuds WRITE (UNIT=*, FMT=100) $ i,' ' // aName(i), aMaths(i), aPhys(i), aChem(i) 40 CONTINUE WRITE(*,*) '' 50 WRITE(*,*) 'Save data to file (y/n)?' READ(*,*) cFile IF (cFile .NE. 'y' .AND. cFile .NE. 'n') THEN WRITE (*,*) 'Illegal choice, please re-enter' GO TO 50 ELSE IF (cFile .EQ. 'y') THEN WRITE (*,*) 'Enter file name:' READ (*,*) cFile OPEN (UNIT=1, FILE=cFile, STATUS='OLD', IOSTAT=nStat) IF (nStat .NE. 0) THEN OPEN (UNIT=1, FILE=cFile, STATUS='NEW') END IF DO 60, i=1, nStuds WRITE (UNIT=1, FMT=*) aName(i), aMaths(i), aPhys(i) $ , aChem(i) 60 CONTINUE CLOSE(1) Write (*,*) 'Date written to file ', cFile END IF END IF 99 FORMAT (' Roll Name Maths Physics Chemistry') 100 FORMAT (1X, I4, T7, A, T24, I3, T33, I3, T44, I3) END Explanation: This program makes extensive use of arrays. The program starts out by asking the user to enter the number of students there are. It then lets the user enter the name, and marks of 3 subjects for each student. It stores all this information is arrays. We then use a simple sorting algorith to sort the arrays sothat the data present in them is present in descending order of the total marks of the 3 subjects. The data is displayed using another loop. After this, the user is asked if he wants to save this data in a file. If he enters 'y', then he is asked for a filename. On entering the filename (e.g. c:\myfile.txt), the program checks if the file already exists, in case it does not the IOSTAT variable nStat return a non-zero number. We then open the file using STATUS='NEW' to create a new file. Using a loop, we then write all the data to the file. We also make use of FORMATTING. For this, we make use of the FORMAT statment. For e.g. line numbered 100 has a FORMAT statement where we have defined the format that is to be used. The format is specified as a string. Each character has a special meaning in the format string. 1X is used for proper new-line formatting, I4 means that we are outputting an Integer value whose width is to be 4, T7 means we want to transfer the next output to column 7 on the device (screen for us) and so on.  Example #3 Text to XML Conversion - All the world talks about today is XML. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. This program reads data from a file created with the previous program and converts it into an XML document so that you can read this data using any other language such as Java or C++. The source code is given below: * Program to convert a text file to XML format * Program assumes that a particular structure exists in the file * The format is as follows: name, physics_marks, * chemistry_marks, maths_marks per line PROGRAM Text2XML CHARACTER cFile*50, cName*20, cOut*50 INTEGER rPhys, rChem, rMath INTEGER nStatus WRITE (*,*) 'Enter the data file path:' READ (*,*) cFile WRITE (*,*) 'Enter the destination xml file name:' READ (*,*) cOut OPEN(UNIT=1, FILE=cFile, STATUS='OLD', IOSTAT=nStatus) IF (nStatus .NE. 0) THEN WRITE (*,*) 'Could not open file for processing.' WRITE (*,*) 'Terminating program.' STOP END IF OPEN(UNIT=2, FILE=cOut, STATUS='OLD', IOSTAT=nStatus) IF (nStatus .NE. 0) THEN OPEN(UNIT=2, FILE=cOut, STATUS='NEW') END IF WRITE(UNIT=2, FMT=*) '' WRITE(UNIT=2, FMT=*) '' 50 READ(UNIT=1, FMT=*, IOSTAT=nStatus) cName, rPhys, rChem, rMath IF (nStatus .NE. 0) THEN GO TO 100 END IF WRITE (*,*) cName, rPhys, rChem, rMath WRITE (UNIT=2, FMT=*) '' WRITE (UNIT=2, FMT=*) '', cName, '' WRITE (UNIT=2, FMT=*) '', rPhys, '' WRITE (UNIT=2, FMT=*) '' GO TO 50 100 WRITE (UNIT=2, FMT=*) '' Write (*,*) 'Finished processing' CLOSE (1) CLOSE (2) END Explanation: Apart from the use of XML tags, the rest of the program is pretty easy To more information on XML, visit http://www.xml.org .