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 which  can
>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.