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From: jensting@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran (LONG, you may think it's religious.)
Message-ID: <1990Jul27.104113.21605@diku.dk>
Date: 27 Jul 90 10:41:13 GMT
References: <11053@chaph.usc.edu>
Sender: news@diku.dk (The Netnews System)
Organization: Department Of Computer Science, University Of Copenhagen
Lines: 33

ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:

>(LONG!)
[..]
(nice article)

I'm no fan of FORTRAN (hehehe, I'm only here to anoy you) either. For
my master thesis I wrote a program that does contrained quadratic integer 
programming, where the cost and contraint functions rely *heavily* on data 
coded as sets. Once previously, a FORTRAN program had been written for 
this task. On our "IBM 370 VM/rfghj{lkjhg" computer this FORTRAN program 
executed our standard test in a mere four CPU-minutes. My first version 
(written in Modula-2) executed the same computation in 3.5 minutes 
		*on-a-8-MHz-PC* 

The problem was, of course, data structure, in that the original 
FORTRAN program used arrays of INTEGERs as set data, testing for 
superset-relation in a DO loop. Modula-2 used bit-maipulations, 
supported in a small way by the hardware in the PC (but not in a big way, 
my sets where 64  elements large, hence a multiword representation 
was used by the compiler *transparantly*).

Now, no-one ever claimed that the original FORTRAN program was optimal, but 
the fact that such terrible performance was obtained (by someone with a lot
of experience in coding this particular algorithm) with FORTRAN is
a living tribute to the, ahemm, futileness of coding in a language with
insufficient data structuring.

	Jens
Jens Tingleff MSc EE, Institute of Computer Science, Copenhagen University
Snail mail: DIKU Universitetsparken 1 DK2100 KBH O
"It never runs around here; it just comes crashing down"
	apologies to  Dire Straits