Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!ames!uhccux!virtue!comp.vuw.ac.nz!munnari.oz.au!mudla!ok
From: ok@mudla.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Keywords: FORTRAN, stupidity
Message-ID: <4922@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 27 Jul 90 12:43:29 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu> <164@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 38

On the whole, I'd like to defend Fortran against Pascal/C/you-name-it bigots,
but I couldn't resist this.

In article <164@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU>, pmontgom@euphemia.math.ucla.edu (Peter Montgomery) writes:
> What other common languages support all four rounding modes, and allow you to
> mix them in one expression, as in
 
> 		i = CEIL(TAN(x)) - NINT(SQRT(y))  ?
 
(a) Common Lisp:
	(setq i (- (ceiling (tan x)) (round (sqrt y)) ))

    [Oops.  Common Lisp *does* support four rounding modes:
	round towards plus infinity	(ceiling)
	round towards minus infinity	(floor)
	round towards zero		(truncate)
	round to nearest/even on tie	(round)
     According to "Fortran 8X explained", NINT should be (round),
     but one F77 document I've seen claims that NINT is (roughly)
	NINT(X) = ISIGN(X)*CEIL(IABS(X))
     which rather surprised me.  I'm assuming that it's round to nearest.]

(b) C:
	i = ceil(tan(x)) - nint(sqrt(y));

    [Ok, only floor(), ceil(), and truncation are defined in the standard,
     but nint() is available in _some_ Cs.  If it isn't,

	double nint(double x)
	    {
		return ceil(x + 0.5) - (fmod(x*0.5 + 0.25, 1.0) != 0);
	    }

     is all it takes.]

I would point out that I was very surprised once when I discovered just
how few of the things I thought of as F77 intrinsics were actually in the
standard.  (ERF doesn't seem to be in F90.)