Object-oriented programming via Fortran 90/95

There is a widely available object oriented (OO) programming language that is usually overlooked in the OO analysis, OO design, OO programming literature. It was designed with most of the features of languages like C++, Eiffel, and Smalltalk. It has extensive and efficient numerical abilities including concise array and matrix handling, like Matlab®. In addition, it is readily extended to massively parallel machines and is backed by an international ISO and ANSI standard. The language is Fortran 90 (and Fortran 95). When the explosion of books and articles on OOP began appearing in the early 1990s many of them correctly disparaged Fortran 77 (F77) for its lack of object oriented abilities and data structures. However, then and now many authors fail to realize that the then new Fortran 90 (F90) standard established a well‐planned object oriented programming language while maintaining a full backward compatibility with the old F77 standard. F90 offers strong typing, encapsulation, inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, and other features important to object oriented programming. This paper will illustrate several of these features that are important to engineering computation using OOP.