I don't know how widely used Fortran is anymore - I know I learned it about 25 years ago and have never used it since.

If you have a lot of data you are going to be looking at, you might consider a database and depending on the amount of data you could use something like access, IBM's DB or Oracle.
If you do this, then it doesn't matter what language the data-generator is written in - once it generates the data and is stored in the database.

'C' language can do just about anything you want - the downside is that its not as easily written as something like Basic or Visual Basic.

I tend to like Visual Basic because you can use functions from C libraries or dll's for those number-crunching requirements (by defining them in the main program general declarations) yet its easy to work with.

Then again - any programming project where you have multiple-programmers at multiple locations is going to be a real tough job.

Canie