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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang,net.physics,net.micro.pc
Subject: Why FORTRAN
Message-ID: <2735@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 17-Jun-84 20:58:05 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2735
Posted: Sun Jun 17 20:58:05 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 19-Jun-84 01:41:25 EDT
Lines: 54

<>
>From: anand@utastro.UUCP Mon Jun 11 08:05:01 1984
>
>My recommendation is DON'T GET UNIX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
>A lot of scientists still use FORTRAN, so a shaky, unreliable
>f77 compiler is a severe drawback, and I believe a scientific, heavily
>arithmetically oriented department cannot afford to base its computation
>on UNIX's FORTRAN.


>From: elt@astrovax.UUCP Tue Jun 12 10:47:25 1984
>The best solution, in my opinion, is to switch to C thus getting a good
>compiler and a superior language; to the extent that the new f77 compiler
>motivates people to do this, it may be a good thing.  Incidentally, the
>advantage to a physical scientist of a computer language superior to
>FORTRAN is analogus to the advantages of a superior mathematical notation.
>
>Of course, switching to C cannot be the whole solution given the existence
>of enormous amounts of useful FORTRAN code, portability requirements, and
>the fact that some people simply won't switch.  There must be a substantial
>amount of money to be made by producing a first class FORTRAN compiler that
>runs under 4.2.

Having spent a good portion of the last decade giving hell to
physicists for using FORTRAN, I'm a little sheepish about coming
to its defense.  It is certainly true that FORTRAN is an awful language
from many standpoints.  It is also true that a good part of the
reluctance to switch from FORTRAN to something better is plain old
inertia.  But I have reservations about C being better than FORTRAN
for scientific programming.  In fact, I don't know of anything better
than FORTRAN for scientific programming (he said, crawling into his
well-protected bunker).

FORTRAN is unique among modern programming languages of any wide
use and acceptance in that it is specifically designed for
numeric programming.  It has an exponentiation operator (**).
It has a large, STANDARD set of function names for widely-used functions.
(I consider this its single greatest strength, by the way.)
It has an immense body of non-standard but widely available,
pre-coded scientific functions (IMSL, for instance).

The only competition I see on the horizon is (heaven help us) Ada.
If you are aware of a language (other than Ada or PL/I) that does
numerical programming as well as FORTRAN, please, PLEASE tell me.

In the meantime, a good preprocessor for FORTRAN 77 may be the
best thing for scientific programmers to use.

Defensively,
D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
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