Object oriented programming via Fortran 90

There is a widely available object oriented (OO) programming language that is usually overlooked in the OO analysis, OO design, OO programming literat ure It was designed with most of the features of languages like C++, Eiffel and Smalltalk. It has extensive and efficient numerical abilities includin g concise array and matrix handling like Matlab(R) In addition, it is readi ly extended to massively parallel machines and is backed by an internationa l ISO and ANSI standard. The language is Fortran 90 (and Fortran 95). When the explosion of boob and articles on OOP began appearing in the early 1990 s 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 w ell-planned object oriented programming language while maintaining a full b ackward compatibility with the old F77 standard. F90 offers strong typing, encapsulation, inheritance, multiple inheritance, polymorphism, and other f eatures important to object oriented programming. This paper will illustrat e several of these features that are important to engineering computation u sing OOP.