Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@bambleweenie57.ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work (SUMMARY) Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 90 08:26:16 GMT Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 18 tong@convex.csd.uwm.edu writes: > the CPU hog in scientifc computing is LOOPS with ARRAYS in it. Not surprisingly--anything else is very cumbersome to express in FORTRAN--and if FORTRAN is all a scientific programmer is familiar with, he'll easily dismiss good algorithms as "too complicated" that are naturally and simply expressed using highly linked data structures, closures, lists, etc. To add to the insult, computer manufacturers like Cray have built whole machines based on the idea that all people want to do is loop sequentially through arrays. Hopefully, once scientific programmers switch to more expressive programming languages (like FORTRAN 9x, C, C++, Modula-3, Scheme, ML, Haskell), scientific programming will be liberated from such limited paradigms. Arrays and loops are very important, but the are not a panacea. Thomas