ABSTRACT
The past decade has seen a boom in the construction of energy efficient buildings which use solar architectural features to maximise the exploitation of daylight, solar heat and solar-driven ventilation. Daylight and building services engineers have therefore become accustomed to the use of specialist software for the physical simulation of buildings. Many of these software programs operate in the FORTRAN environment and, with new releases of FORTRAN available for the development work, this area of activity will see even more growth. Despite the fact that presently languages, which are more structured than FORTRAN, e.g. C, are available, the former continues to be used widely in the engineering sector. Popular building physics simulation programs such as ESP and SERI-RES use the FORTRAN environment. ‘The “Grand Challenges of Science and Engineering” for the foreseeable future will involve the use of FORTRAN-like programs on supercomputers’ was an observation made in a recent report prepared for the President of the US, as quoted by Edgar (1992). After its creation in the 1950s, FORTRAN developed many different dialects. However, the current standard is FORTRAN 95 (Nyhoff and Leestma, 1995).
