Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Message-ID: <58098@lanl.gov>
Date: 25 Jul 90 21:51:43 GMT
References: <11029@chaph.usc.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 63

In article <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu> moshkovi@cn.ecn.purdue.edu writes:
>Please, don't consider my question offending, but why the hell in this world
>you people still using FORTRAN

People use Fortran instead of C for the same reason that people use
English, French, or German instead of Esperanto.  One: its a better,
more expressive language (for the uses for which it is intended).
Two: there is a large body of material already written in the language
which would be difficult (and undesireable) to translate.

Fortran vs. C has another feature which is not present in the natural
language analogy (or maybe it is - judge for yourself): Fortran is
_inherently_ more efficient for numerical/scientific work than C is.
The C parameter passing mechanism implicitly coerces all arrays to
pointers - which degrades the efficiency of the procedure being called.

From article <11029@chaph.usc.edu>, by ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah):
> [...]
> Honestly, I can't imagine why Fortran is half as popular as it
> is.  All old libraries can be linked into Pascal/C programs these
> days, which removes the only "fundamental" reason to hang on with
> fortran.

Pascal is a _much_ better language than C.  I don't know why you
mention them in the same context.  In most respects, Pascal is on
the opposite end of the language spectrum from C - Fortran would
actually lie _between_ them in most respects.  They _are_ similar
in that neither on provides adequate support for array computations.

> [...]      no checking for number/type of arguments to
> functons/subroutines,

This is not a feature of Fortran - it is a feature of many implementations
of Fortran.  It is also a feature of all the C implementations I've ever
seen.  It is _not_ a valid complaint in this context.

> [...]                                           not to mention the
> silly syntactic irritations.

C has _many_more_ of these than Fortran does.  Starting with expression
valued assignment, control structures with begin-end (though C spells
them as '{' and '}'), case-sensitive names, comments that wrap off the
end of lines, statements that wrap off the end of lines, lack of a
logical data type (which is a syntactic irritant because it causes C to
require two complete sets of boolean operators), etc..  Note that I've
only mentioned those problems which are _known_ from psychological and
error survey studies to be detrimental to programmer productivity.
A whole crowd of additional features (which are almost certainly bad
but haven't been tested): over 40 operators, 15 levels of precedence,
_really_ peculiar declaration syntax (I'm told that it looks this
way so that the declaration will look like a use - but see what follows),
_really_ peculiar syntax for using complex data items, etc..


This brings us to the _real_ reason that Fortran users don't switch to C
- C is _NOT_ an improvement!!  Fortran has a number of deficiencies,
_some_ (very few) of which are corrected in C.  But C introduces other
deficiencies - worse than the ones it corrects.  Quite rationally,
Fortran users are waiting for a _BETTER_ language to show up before they
switch.  Fortran 90 had a chance to be this better language - but they
blew it with a brain-dead pointer proposal (among other problems).

J. Giles