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From: ghm@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au (Geoff Miller)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran (LONG, you may think it's religious.)
Message-ID: <1782@ccadfa.adfa.oz.au>
Date: 1 Aug 90 00:23:59 GMT
References: <11053@chaph.usc.edu>
Organization: Computer Centre, University College, UNSW, ADFA, Canberra, Australia
Lines: 46

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

>...I fell in love with computers at first 
>sight; and wrote something like 10k lines of fortran within those 
>three months.  You can say I know fortran intimately.

You might.  I wouldn't.  I've spent much of the past fourteen years writing
and debugging FORTRAN and I wouldn't make that claim.

>...Personally, I've found
>tremendous gains in complexity control through "smart" data structures"
>in every single program i've written.

Agreed.  However, (a) FORTRAN is now moving in that direction, and (b)
this is still a function of programmer skill.  A programmer who
thinks about data structures, optimisation of array access and a host of
other considerations will write better programs than someone who doesn't,
and it doesn't matter what language they are writing in.

>My grouse with the "fortran-style-programmer" lies in the way he
>takes fortran to be the black-box solution to every computing
>problem.  There is something so myopic there, it really gets me
>irritated talking with such a specimen.  Instead of thinking in
>terms of a huge space of possibilities where fortran programs are
>one (pretty limited) option, there is the mentality of
>approaching everything as a fortran program.
>-- 

I'm still not sure what you mean by "fortran-style-programmer".  If you have
looked at any of the recent guides to FORTRAN style (such as the one 
David Levine put together late last year) you will see a heavy emphasis on
modularity, maintainability and maximal use of utility libraries, which
seems to fit very well with your approach.

The other points about FORTRAN are that there is a well-defined standard,
leading to portability, and that FORTRAN compilers are generally quite
efficient.  A few years ago I was working on one computer (not where I am 
now, incidentally) where the PASCAL compiler was so inefficient that we
had to prohibit its use.

Really, though, you have to look at any language in the context of what it
was designed to do, because there is no such thing as the ideal general-purpose
language (unless you are a believer in ADA?).

Geoff Miller (ghm@cc.adfa.oz.au)
Computer Centre, Australian Defence Force Academy