Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!agate!stew.ssl.berkeley.edu!link From: link@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical anal Message-ID: <14494@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 20 Sep 88 06:54:58 GMT References: <1530@ficc.uu.net> <3746@lanl.gov> Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 44 In article <3746@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: >You are a died-in-the-wool C type I am NOT taking a position here regarding C vs FORTRAN in numerical applications. One Friday night, after probably too much beer, one of our systems programmers working on a very complex satellite mission (he also has an MS in physics) and I had a relatively incoherent discussion on the relative merits of C and FORTRAN. We both remained unconvinced. From experience, I suspect that comparing computer languages is rather like comparing religions. One is either a true believer or an infidel. Having taught numerical analysis to senior physics students, let me say that the choice of language is not all that important. I even taught Algol for 2 years. However, the arguments against FORTRAN ignore both its historical and contemporary importance. Numerical analysis, for better or worse, is virtually synonymous with FORTRAN. Very few IMPORTANT mathematical packages have been written in other languages and then ported to FORTRAN; the opposite is the rule - serious scientific programming is done in FORTRAN. Period. The latter statement is not an opinion; it is a fact. Check the available scientific libraries and compare the lines of code available in C and FORTRAN. I have yet to discover a single compelling reason to switch from FORTRAN to C, other than "it's a more modern language". I am grateful for the fact that I did not endeavour to learn PL/I or Pascal on this specious basis. Both (!) are still taught at educational institutions I attended. FORTRAN is a good number-crunching tool; it is not intended to be a good systems development language such as C. But then C was not designed to be a number cruncher. Why don't we all save the bull on the net and try to use the most appropriate tool for the problem at hand? Dr. Richard Link Space Sciences Laboratory University of California, Berkeley link@ssl.berkeley.edu