Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!topgun.dspo.gov!lanl!jlg From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: Re: C vs. FORTRAN Message-ID: <14014@lanl.gov> Date: 8 Aug 89 20:20:46 GMT References: <3288@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu> <225800204@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <14523@bfmny0.UUCP> Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory Lines: 18 From article <14523@bfmny0.UUCP>, by tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff): > [...] Software that works right, and early, > is more important that a shaved MIP. [...] In that case, Fortran is certainly a better choice than C for most numerical computations. Fortunately, it also helps if you're after shaving a few MIPs as well. The best test for a programming language is that simple concepts should be simple to represent. For numerical computations, Fortran does this better than C. Consider, for example, a routine to do matrix multiply on arbitrary sized and shaped matrices - both C an Fortran require the programmer to express the iteration explicitly, but only C requires the index calculations to be done explicitly. C++ does better, but only if the programmer has implemented a class for matrices and the definitions of the operations. Still, it's a step in the right direction - when will we see a Fortran++ ?