Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!jhunix!ereiamjh
From: ereiamjh@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Tom B. O'Toole)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Unique Applications Summary
Summary: C = welcome to unix AGAIN too bad
Keywords: bile,spleen,anti-unix
Message-ID: <6449@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 18 Sep 90 20:01:04 GMT
References: <1990Sep17.180356.11614@pdn.paradyne.com>
Reply-To: ereiamjh@jhunix.UUCP (Tom B. O'Toole)
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 42


I missed the original post, but feel a base urge to comment. I worked at the
Johns Hopkins Med. school as a system administrator of a dept. system for
a bunch of xray crystallographers. The ONLY language considered, 
then, and for the most part now, was FORTRAN. 
Besides the fact that it is what they always used
and it was what they knew, there were some other good reasons. There were
many packages in fortran, and fortran programs are, in general, extremely
portable. Fortran also, in general, has the best performance of any language.
  When some people decided they would jump on the bandwagon and start using
C, they found a factor of 4 performance degradation for their application
and changed their minds (this is VAX VMS, VAXC vs. VAX Fortran). 
  While Unix is certainly becoming more prevalent, it is the unix bias of
C that makes it so non portable (I should say the 'standard' C library, the
language itself doesn't show all that much bias). Typical unix programs
are often a bear to port to other environments, due to the fact that C and
library encourage the programmer to be cute and use lots of neat unix specific
features. The C crowd  (unix advocates or 'market research investment
bankers pretending they are computing authorities pushing the latest 'iron'
in the trade rags that runs unix because it was easier to  pay at&t
than write something original') says that this is the 'standard'
library and all systems must implement it, but it's basically a one-to-one
mapping with the unix rtl and systems calls, and I'm not fooled. The systems
that do try to implement it (and I'm sure THEY have a hell of a time) end up
having to emulate unix, a mondo undertaking and a guaranteed performance
hit. I don't think people writing C programs in a unix environment 'get' 
this ("huh? your not running unix? You're using a computer aren't you?
oh well i guess it's a MAC then?").
  My experience has gradually come to make me loathe C. Yeah, sure, 
fortran is a creaky old language and theres a lot of spaghetti code out
there and a lot of people writing good C programs (which brings up another
pet peeve: typing "nameofcprogram -crypticarg1crypticarg2..." on VMS !@&^%$!),
but when I write a program, I think I'll just use fortran (hell, I'll use
anything, just pleeeease not C, anything but !(@&@#%^# C). Then on the
other hand I could just bite the bullet and, gee, if I'm in a unix environment
it basically works, depending on what version of unix, and, yeah, I can just
grep the glob 'til I yacc, and, yeah they say this new unix box really has a
lot a MIPS, and, gosh, everyone else is and, oo i feel better now... 
-- 
Tom O'Toole - ecf_stbo@jhuvms.bitnet - JHUVMS system programmer 
Homewood Computing Facilities, Johns Hopkins University, Balto. Md. 21218 
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