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From: eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: What language do you use for scientific programming?
Message-ID: <1098@ames.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Aug-85 13:22:56 EDT
Article-I.D.: ames.1098
Posted: Wed Aug 21 13:22:56 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Aug-85 17:18:08 EDT
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Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
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Some time ago, a person posted a small FORTRAN program, and I blew up
at a comment along the lines "you can see why I used FORTRAN."

I tend to like C.  I try to use C on the Cray, VAX, PDP, and other machines
I use.  I am forced to use FORTRAN on some Cray applications because it
is the only language with multiprocessor support currently.  I hear
the Cray Pascal is decent, but have not used it.  C is far from
perfect [apologies to dutoit!dmr], but I like it for getting the job done.
There are features in many other languages I would not mind having:
operator overloading would be nice for complex or quaterions in C,
some protection and structuring features of CLU, better interfaces to
things like graphics, monitoring, and debugging [some of this bordering
closer to hardware], but these are all syntaxtic or semantic sugar to C.

The problem is that lots of problems are not language related, or a
different smaller specialized language would do the job better.
Otherwise, if you look at it, there is very little difference whether you
program in Pascal, FORTRAN, C, ... and stretching it: even LISP and PROLOG.
You can include specialized packages in this category, too: SPSS,
BMDP, and so forth.  Just more of the same.  The problems come with
moving data around between these different systems: hence, good programming
environments.  It just so happens that FORTRAN is not enough of such
an environment to do this moving.

There is no one perfect language for `scientific programing.'  You might
argue that English or German is the perfect scientific language to discuss
this in.

--eugene miya
  NASA Ames Research Center
  {hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene
  emiya@ames-vmsb