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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>
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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 take  and 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