Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utastro.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!houxm!houxz!vax135!floyd!cmcl2!seismo!ut-sally!utastro!anand From: anand@utastro.UUCP (Anand Sivaramakrishnan) Newsgroups: net.physics Subject: RE: Unix for physicists (attn:finn) Message-ID: <90@utastro.UUCP> Date: Mon, 11-Jun-84 11:05:01 EDT Article-I.D.: utastro.90 Posted: Mon Jun 11 11:05:01 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 12-Jun-84 01:09:33 EDT Organization: UTexas Astronomy Dept., Austin, Texas Lines: 36 I am a dynamicist by nature (so I'm a theoretical physicist/ stat. mechanician or whatever under my astronomer's clothing) here at U. of Texas, and we have a vax 11/780 under Berkely's UNIX (sob! sniffle!). My recommendation is DON'T GET UNIX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have found that an awful lot of people waste an awful lot of time trying to fix or get around bugs in the compiler (FORTRAN). 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. Here on our VAX even absolutely standard fortran 77 can foul up in compilation or running, and diagnostics are terrible (there is a symbolic debugger that doesn't work with the updated version of fortran 77 but does with the older version of f77 - but this f77 does not handle character data with equanimity) . Even the 4.2BSD f77 compiler gets ruffled by simple integer and character arithmetic... it seems to overwrite chunks of memory and pull out random values for previously well-behaved variables. Things that look like arcane optimization bugs appear ROUTINELY when we compile with NO OPTIMIZATION. I have used VMS, and I can see that UNIX is so much more fun to use, but I think that the pros of unix, for a math/phys/astron department, are heavily outweighed by its cons. That's my 2 cents....