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From: gillett@ceomax..dec.com (Christopher Gillett)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran (LONG, you may think it's religious.)
Message-ID: <408@e2big.mko.dec.com>
Date: 27 Jul 90 13:41:16 GMT
References: <11053@chaph.usc.edu>
Sender: usenet@e2big.mko.dec.com
Reply-To: gillett@ceomax.dec.com (Christopher Gillett)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Semiconductor Engineering Group
Lines: 76


In article <11053@chaph.usc.edu> ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
...
>Last year, I joined the RAND corporation where my research group
>lives on large-scale maximum likelihood.  On all three relevant 
>fronts: size of datasets, dimensions of parameter vector and
>complexity of likelihood function, our work is cutting edge. 
>Before I arrived, every single job was done with a monolithic
>fortran program.
>
>FACT 1:
>	Just for kix, I wrote a maximum likelihood package one
>	night in Turbo Pascal.  It took a week to make it totally
>	slick.  My program is far more comfortable to use than the
>	fortran programs used at RAND, and does more in terms of
>	statistical computations supported.  I used the Turbo
>	Numerical Methods toolbox; it had all the basic routines I
>	needed, I only had to write a few routines related to the
>	normal distribution by hand where I hand-translated public-
>	domain ratfor code.

It's excellent that you were able to create a good application
using Turbo Pascal, but is this really an effective comparison to
FORTRAN?  Personally, I'm a big fan of Borland, but I don't ever need
to have the capability of moving code to a Cray, or a Convex, or some
other reasonably large number cruncher.  Yes, the days of 800 analysts
using their tubes to hook up to a big central machine are long since
past, but the need to crunch numbers using pretty substantial iron 
still exists. 

>A lot of people doing scientific programming live in a daze where
>mainstream computer science is for every other kind of
>programming in the world; *they* only need to write fortran
>programs without intelligence in data structures, etc.  I think
>that attitude is a sad mistake.  Personally, I've found
>tremendous gains in complexity control through "smart" data structures"
>in every single program i've written.
>

It seems that what you're really complaining about here is the
abilities and practices of scientific programmers, not the language
itself.  You could write: "*they* only need to write C programs
without intelligence in data structures, etc." just as easily.
You are correct in that there are a lot of really huge FORTRAN
programs, written in very strange ways, bouncing around the world.
If you've ever seen some of the automobile simulators used by 
the car companies, you've seen FORTRAN applications consisting
of anywhere from 500K .. 1E+06K lines of code.  Some of these
programs are well written, others are not.

Your comments about "smart" data structures is well taken.  In fact,
it's so well taken that the emerging FORTRAN standard addresses it
with the inclusion of structures, type, and the like.  I haven't
followed the standardization process since I left Absoft (AC/FORTRAN
lives! :-) ), but it seems to me the committee was headed in the
right direction with respect to modularization and more powerful 
notions of data representation.

One thing that hasn't been mentioned much in defense of FORTRAN is
the sheer weight of the existing applications.  There are not too
many companies willing to drop large amounts of money into rewriting
software just because the language is old and lacks some of the
expressiveness of newer languages.  Nor are there a lot of programmers,
scientists, or analysts who really want to crawl inside those huge
programs to understand how to rewrite them.

>Ajay Shah, (213)747-9991, ajayshah@usc.edu

Just my $0.02....

/Chris
k
---
Christopher Gillett               gillett@ceomax.dec.com
Digital Equipment Corporation     {decwrl,decpa}!ceomax.dec.com!gillett
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