Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!uw-beaver!Teknowledge.COM!unix!garth!fouts@bozeman.ingr.com (Martin Fouts)
From: fouts@bozeman.ingr.com (Martin Fouts)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Inlining subroutines at link time
Message-ID: <584@garth.UUCP>
Date: 17 Jul 90 18:32:51 GMT
References: <1990Jul3.194348.21178@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> <9595@brazos.Rice.edu> <1990Jul3.215128.23026@portia.Stanford.EDU> <138349@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
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Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
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In-reply-to: lm@snafu.Sun.COM's message of 4 Jul 90 00:31:39 GMT

In article <138349@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> lm@snafu.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy) writes:

   In article <1990Jul3.215128.23026@portia.Stanford.EDU> dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) writes:
   >    Geez, is this a cheap shot, or what?  FORTRAN has its weaknesses,
   >but inefficiency is not one of them.  I know of no other language that
   >can be as effectively optimized.  

   Yeah, I used to like fortran pretty well.  I have before me "Programmers Guide
   to Fortran 90" which contains things, such as pointers, that make me wonder
   if this is going to make fortran an uninteresting language.


A few years ago I translated the Livermore Loops from Fortran to
semantically equivalent C.  On every machine I ran both version on,
the C version produced correct results faster than the Fortran
version.   Every machine includes:  Cray 2, X/MP and Y/MP, Amdahl
5880, Sun 3, SGI Iris 4D, Vax running BSD, Convex, and Alliant.  That
was a few years ago, and I am sure some improvements have been made in
Fortran compilers since then. (;-)

There are parts of Fortran which are very easy to optimize.  There are
parts which are harder to optimize.  The same is true for other
languages.  The trick with Fortran is that being a smaller language it
has fewere of the latter.  I can write very efficient code in C, and I
can write horrible code in Fortran; so, in another sense the old saw
"You can write Fortran in any language" is as true about efficiency as
about anything else.

Marty
--
Martin Fouts

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If you can find an opinion in my posting, please let me know.
I don't have opinions, only misconceptions.