Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical anal Message-ID: <474@quintus.UUCP> Date: 25 Sep 88 07:46:13 GMT References: <1530@ficc.uu.net> <3746@lanl.gov> <14494@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1475@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu> <834@cernvax.UUCP> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 22 In article <834@cernvax.UUCP> hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews) writes: >OK, so to make the contest into a contest (without libraries you lose) we'll >allow standard libraries. You takeand I'll take the NAG library. > is available on almost all machines with a C compiler. NAG is >available on almost all machines with a FORTRAN compiler for people interested >in numerical work, so that's obviously fair. This is _not_ a fair comparison. malloc(), printf(), and other things are part of the draft ANSI C standard, and have been four the last four years to my own knowledge and probably longer. A "hosted" version of C which does not provide printf() will _not_ be standard, and people have known this for years. malloc() is no more a "library" function in C than SIN() is a "library" function in Fortran. If you buy a Fortran compiler, you do not normally get a copy of the NAG library; you have to go to a different company and pay them more money. Furthermore, there are competing numerical libraries: some people might use NAG, some might use IMSL, some might use PORT, some might pick things up from netlib, ... There are no well-known libraries competing with the stdio interface. -- I may not understand what you say, but I will defend to the death my right to deny it - Walt Kelly