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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....