Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!husc6!cca!g-rh From: g-rh@cca.CCA.COM (Richard Harter) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: C vs. FORTRAN Summary: Damned if I will Message-ID: <30904@cca.CCA.COM> Date: 13 Jul 88 15:13:03 GMT References: <3136@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <225800038@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <892@garth.UUCP> <774@naucse.UUCP> <941@garth.UUCP> Reply-To: g-rh@CCA.CCA.COM (Richard Harter) Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge, MA Lines: 31 In article <941@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes: >>Lets see malloc or alloca[1] in fortran without some low level routines >>in some other language. Also recursion, yes you can make your own stack >>but how big do you make this stack? >I'll let some fortran freak rise and show how to abuse blank common. In >addition, some low level routines? Does this mean C is not sufficient for >itself? And how big do you make a stack for stack based languages? The only >difference is whether you securely implement it out of sight and out of >mind, or make it big as life and twice as natural? I worked on a project circa 1972 where we did this -- dynamic storage allocation using blank common, emulated structures and pointers, and so on. I've posted the relevant techniques once -- damned if I'll do it again. If you want to know how to do it, figure it out for yourself. Real programmers don't whimper about the language they are stuck with; they just do it with whatever they have to work it. They don't make wimpy comments about "you can't do x in language y". You could write the unix kernel in fortran if you wanted to; you could write it as a teco macro if you wanted. If it turns you on and you've got the bucks, I'll do it for you. [My rates for this kind of work start at $1000 an hour -- this includes a mental abuse surcharge. :-)] Note: These crochety comments are addressed to the chap that Steve quoted. Steve sounds like a sensible sort of fellow to me. -- In the fields of Hell where the grass grows high Are the graves of dreams allowed to die. Richard Harter, SMDS Inc.