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From: ian@argosy.UUCP (Ian L. Kaplan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 9X replaced by Ada 9X ?
Message-ID: <675@argosy.UUCP>
Date: 13 Sep 90 19:20:28 GMT
References: <1990Sep13.013750.24378@relay.wpd.sgi.com>
Sender: news@argosy.UUCP
Reply-To: ian@bear.UUCP (Ian L. Kaplan)
Organization: MasPar Computer Corporation, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 52


  I am only partially familiar with the old version of Ada, so I
certainly do not know what new extensions have been proposed for the
new version.  I am, however, familiar with Fortran 90.

  In Fortran 90 arrays are first class objects on which all of the
basic atomic operations (+, -, *, /) can be performed.  Many
intrinsics become array valued, user functions can return arrays and
arrays can be sectioned.  Although Fortran 90 has many other features,
the support for array processing is, in my opinion, the most
important.  The Fortran 90 array syntax provides a natural way to
express algorithms on multiprocessor machines.  Unless the new Ada
supports these features, I do not think that it will supplant Fortran
90.

  There are some side issues to keep in mind as well.  

  1. Fortran has "grown up" in the numeric community and supports
     features specificly for numeric programming.  These features include
     the complex data type and a large set of intrinsics (for example,
     Fortran 90 supports intrinsics for transpose and matrix multiply).

  2. When Ada first came out the major focus was on implementing a
     conforming Ada product.  Since the language is so large and not
     all the semantic implications were clear, a number of vendors were
     late in this effort.  Compared to the work on Fortran, I have
     seen much less focus on developing highly efficient optimizing Ada
     compilers.  The performance of the compiled code is critical in
     large numeric applications.

  3. People forget how many years it took before Fortran 77 started to
     become a widely adopted standard.  The Fortran 90 standard has
     only recently been adopted, so it is probably a little early to start
     concluding that vendors will not implement it.  How fast a vendor
     implements it may depend on the sort of machine they sell.
     Vendors selling vector processors (Alliant, for example) have
     already implement some of Fortran 90's array features.  Vendors
     selling SIMD processors (MasPar and Thinking Machines) also
     implement the array features.  While these are all tiny companies
     compared to IBM or DEC, these days most innovation comes from
     small companies.

  From what I can see, Ada has not met with broad acceptance outside
of the goverment, where people are forced to use it.  If I were to
place a bet on a language that would start to eat into Fortran's
dominance in numeric programming I would bet on ANSI C.

                          Ian Kaplan
                          ian@mapar.com
                          argosy!ian@decwrl.dec.com

These opinions are my own and not those of MasPar Computer Corp.