What FORTRAN compiler should I choose?

In My Humble Opinion
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I want a clean, robust, simple FORTRAN compiler and (probably) integrated development environment for writing small and moderate technical utilities and applications. I want to write and run them on the Windows 2000+ platform and distribute them to other users on this platform with a minimum of fuss on their part, hand them a .exe that they can run as is. I’m not so interested in tricky Windows graphics, web-based programs, and other new age complexity. My interests are liklier to involve mathematical tricks than slick GUI tricks, but I do want to hand users GUI-based programs, and to be able to display graphs.

I haven’t used FORTRAN for 30 years but I hear it’s alive and well and has a bright future in technical computing.

I’ve noticed Absoft and Lahey products and heard a little about others.

I do lots of technical programming in a variety of languages and develop just a few things for other’s use so far. I don’t have a good tool to hand people GIU based programs and giving people console applications isn’t very successful these days. So I’m thinking one of these <$1000 entry level IDE’s might be the ticket.

What are your favorites and why? Thanks!!!

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I’ve used Compaq Visual Fortran for an IDE.

I think the compiler is probably f90. But, I’ve only ever used it for console apps, nothing with even a rudimentary GUI.

Is Fortran really that crucial to the mathematics that you can’t use Visual C++ or Borland and do it in C++?

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>Is Fortran really that crucial to the mathematics that you can’t use Visual C++ or Borland and do it in C++?

I don’t think Fortran’s crucial to the math in the sense that it couldn’t be done with C, but I don’t like C all that much, and I’m struck by how popular Fortran is with scientists and how easy the Absoft version I saw looked. And all the programming I’ve done has been procedural, which has always been fine by me, so for my interests the ++ looks like kind of a minus. C might be my answer if the Fortran route looks like a bust, but I still want to poke at it for a while to see.