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From: john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran -vs- C (yet again)
Message-ID: <1990Nov25.082430.3229@ariel.unm.edu>
Date: 25 Nov 90 08:24:30 GMT
References: <1990Nov24.002836.19739@ariel.unm.edu> <1270009@hpcllmv.HP.COM>
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Organization: University of New Mexico Math Dept., Albuquerque, NM
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In article <1270009@hpcllmv.HP.COM> jbc@hpcllmv.HP.COM (Jeff Caldwell) writes:
>
>I work at Hewlett Packard and currently write/maintain/enhance both the 
>Fortran and C compilers for 4 different platforms (different machine types).
>I feel C is a much better language for sophisticated datatype/structure 
>manipulation.  It's ease of use of pointers and structures is unmatched
>by even the most robust implementations of Fortran.  Fortran, on the other
>hand, allows you to do terribly perverse things to memory with the use of
>COMMON blocks and EQUIVALENCEs.  You can't even begin to do some of the
>data overlapping and data disection in C that Fortran enables you to do.

I totally agree about the virtues of C for datatype/structure manipulation.
But I cringe at the use of COMMON blocks and EQUIVALENCES in Fortran,
even though I have used them to do the sorts of perverse memory handling
you suggest (at least years ago).  Nowadays I would say that there is
little need for such things however, given the ability to do dynamic
memory allocation either by linking to malloc or in Fortran 90.

>Of course, I haven't mentioned anything that is news to anyone.  I guess
>the fact that I wouldn't want to write anything larger that a couple of
>hundred lines in Fortran but don't mind writing large applications in C
>says something for C.

Perhaps, but are you programming numerical codes?  The codes we
develop average 50,000 to 100,000 lines of Fortran (probably half
of that are comments however).  If it is done with care, we have
had minimal problems and we run the same code on everything from
PC's to Crays to Connection Machines (though the CM2 does require
some modification to exploit Fortran 90 array constructs).

>P.S. Both the Fortran and C compilers are written in C :-)

No question about that, but so?  A compiler is not a numerical
computation.

John Prentice
Amparo Corporation