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++ ?