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From: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: f2c experiences? (really C vs fortran strings)
Message-ID: <16414@cgl.ucsf.EDU>
Date: 26 Nov 90 08:00:05 GMT
References: <1990Nov25.204354.12324@ariel.unm.edu> <28393@usc>
Sender: daemon@cgl.ucsf.edu
Reply-To: seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu (George Seibel)
Organization: Computer Graphics Lab, UCSF
Lines: 27

In article <28393@usc> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
>
>I'm not used to thinking of fortran as being a place to do
>string handling! :-)

I think the most persistent myth in all of computing is the superiority
of C over fortran for string handling.   C is vastly superior for
*byte* handling, but *bytes are not strings*.   Fortran has string data
types and string operators.  C doesn't.   It was probably a bad choice
on the part of the designers of fortran 77 to use the term "CHARACTER"
for what should perhaps have been called the "STRING" data type.
Nevertheless, fortran CHARACTER variables are in fact strings, and the
language contains powerful facilities for their manipulation.   I've
written elaborate parsers in both languages;  in both cases I had to
augment the existing string handling functionality with a couple of
5-line functions, i.e., neither language was "perfect", but neither
language was "incapable".  One thing that the C string approach works
better for is dealing with arrays of strings with widely varying
lengths.   Here C allows you to save memory by using pointers to
contiguous byte arrays, whereas the easy way to do it in fortran is
with fixed-width strings.  There are efficient fortran solutions as
well, using indices into character arrays or substrings.   All in all,
when I think about the areas in which C is better than fortran, string
handling is not one of them.

George Seibel, UCSF
seibel@cgl.ucsf.edu