Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!utah-gr!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wes
From: wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical anal
Message-ID: <182@obie.UUCP>
Date: 16 Sep 88 04:58:16 GMT
References: <893@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <50500072@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <1440@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>
Organization: the Well of Souls
Lines: 17

In article <1440@valhalla.ee.rochester.edu>, davis@galaxy.ee.rochester.edu (Al Davis) writes:
> The fact that Fortran does not support dynamic memory allocation makes it
> unsuitable for nearly all numerical analysis applications.

An ex-colleague of mine :-) insisted for months that C was completely
unsuited for numerical analysis work, and that Fortran was the only
language with the requisite features.  Then he ran out of memory for the
program he was doing.  A friend and I re-wrote it in C in three hours,
using a linked list instead of the large array he was using, and the
size of problem he could handle went up by a factor of 10.  This
particular "programmer" had never heard of a sparse matrix.  And to
think, he was paid more that I was (then :-).
-- 
                     {hpda, uwmcsd1}!sp7040!obie!wes

         "How do you make the boat go when there's no wind?"
                                 -- Me --