Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran vs C for computations Message-ID: <473@quintus.UUCP> Date: 25 Sep 88 07:29:44 GMT References: <465@quintus.UUCP> <4092@lanl.gov> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 27 In article <4092@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: >When I _mean_ 'every', I _say_ 'every'. When I say 'a', I mean 'a'; The use of articles in English is considerably more complicated than we commonly realise. For example: The native pigeon is protected. Just one pigeon? No, all of them. A mistake like this should be corrected. Which mistake? Any mistake like that. f77 compiles a Fortran program. Just one specific program? No, lots of them. It is expected to compile *every* legal Fortran program. In a case like this, if you mean that >'there exist Fortran programs (at least one) to whichcan >be applied' you write f77 compiles some Fortran programs. A preprocessor for Fortran given a legal input file should not produce incorrect output. Which preprocessor? Every preprocessor. Which input files should not yield incorrect output? Every legal one. And in the context of a claim that a Fortran preprocessor is not needed because cpp can be applied to "a" Fortran program, the universal reading is forced: if there were many Fortran programs which could not be processed by cpp, that would not be a valid argument against having a Fortran preprocessor.