Accessing Fortran and c programs from the World-Wide Web

This paper describes a method for calling Fortran and C programs from World-Wide Web documents. As more and more of our teaching material and lecture material is made available on the web, it is very important to be able to have the ability to call existing or new Fortran or C programs either in class or outside of class. While the method described below runs the Fortran or C programs on the machines where these programs exist, it appears as though the programs are machine independent. That is, while the programs are compiled for a certain machine, users from any type of machine can access and run them. Two example programs are discussed. Comparisons to JAVA are also made in the paper.