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From: idall@augean.OZ (Ian Dall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: C vs. FORTRAN
Message-ID: <558@augean.OZ>
Date: 11 Aug 89 15:02:44 GMT
References: <3288@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu> <225800204@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <14523@bfmny0.UUCP> <14014@lanl.gov>
Organization: Engineering Faculty, University of Adelaide, Australia
Lines: 22
Reply-To:

I think I'm going to regret this posting but...

In article <14014@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>
>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.

It's been a long while since I programmed in FORTRAN but I did do quite
a lot of it once and I know of know way of handling arbitrary shaped
multidimensioned arrays in FORTRAN. You are not thinking of a vendor
specific enhancement are you? Or maybe one of these new fangled versions
of FORTRAN do indeed have such support.

LOTS of FORTRAN subroutines use indicies of the form I*XDIM + J
and if that isn't explicit index calculation I don't know what is!
-- 
 Ian Dall           life (n). A sexually transmitted disease which afflicts
                              some people more severely than others.
idall@augean.oz