Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!tektronix!nosun!lfm.fpssun.fps.com!lfm
From: lfm@fpssun.fps.com (Larry Meadows)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical anal
Summary: programmer not the language
Message-ID: <322@lfm.fpssun.fps.com>
Date: 19 Sep 88 19:39:47 GMT
References: <893@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <50500072@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <182@obie.UUCP>
Organization: Floating Point Systems
Lines: 23

In article <182@obie.UUCP>, wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes) writes:
:
: 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 :-).

Of course, we have been writing programs using sparse matrices in
Fortran for years & years (e.g., Spice).  Linked lists are not
specific to C, and it is likely that one would want to use an
'array of indices' implementation rather than an 'absolute pointer'
implementation regardless of the language used.  As the header to
the Lawrence Livermore benchmark states:

	There is not now and there never will be a language in
	which it is the least difficult to write bad programs.
-- 
Larry Meadows @ FPS			...!tektronix!fpssun!lfm
					...!nosun!fpssun!lfm