Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!ut-emx!mjl
From: mjl@ut-emx.UUCP (Maurice LeBrun)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Keywords: FORTRAN, stupidity
Message-ID: <34523@ut-emx.UUCP>
Date: 26 Jul 90 19:58:39 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: mjl@emx.UUCP (Maurice LeBrun)
Organization: UTexas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
Lines: 35

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, while so many nice C around.
>
>Gene

Sorry, it WAS offending.  You might have left off the 'stupidity'
keyword if you truly didn't mean to be insulting.

As many people have expressed, Fortran usually produces the fastest
code on many high end systems.  It is also typically far better
supported than any other language, which is a bit unfortunate.  The
attitude that "there will never be any significant computation in any
language other than Fortran" is still prevalent in some circles, and
in fact has hampered getting a C++ compiler up on the Crays at NERSC
(formerly called NMFECC).

Different people deal with the inadequacies of Fortran in different
ways.  There are the vendor-supported compiler extensions.  I prefer
to use a preprocessor (such as Ratfor), so that the code maintains its
portability.  Use 'implicit none', if it's supported.  Have the
compiler load uninitialized variables with "non-numbers" so that an
exception occurs if you use them.  And so on...

Also, it is much more difficult to intermix C and Fortran than it may
seem (see other messages on this subject).  And it is very system-
dependent.  This makes incrementally rewriting code in C much more of
a hassle.

Finally, in agreement with some of the other messages posted here, I'm
not sure if switching to C gives enough "value" to be worth the
effort.  Now, C++ may be a different story..

Maurice LeBrun                Institute for Fusion Studies  
mjl@fusion.ph.utexas.edu      University of Texas at Austin