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 --