Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!lanl!lambda!ttw
From: ttw@lambda.UUCP (Tony Warnock)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Summary: equivalence relations
Keywords: FORTRAN, stupidity
Message-ID: <14449@lambda.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jul 90 23:26:24 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu>
Lines: 16



     Another reason to prefer Fortran to C or Pascal
     is that many of the Fortran operators are better
     behaved than the analogous ones in C or Pascal.

     For example: the .EQ. operator in Fortran is
     an equivalence relation, that is, it is reflexive,
     symetric, and transitive. It is not for C and for
     Pascal. Actually in Pascal, at least, the analogous
     predicate violates all three properties. This behavior
     makes program analysis and optimization much harder.

     Of course the reason is that Fortran is designed more
     with mathematics in mind than most other languages. It
     is not clear what the "equals" predicate in Pascal means.