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From: john@ghostwheel.unm.edu (John Prentice)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work
Message-ID: <1990Nov30.220756.9196@ariel.unm.edu>
Date: 30 Nov 90 22:07:56 GMT
References: <2392:Nov2902:59:0590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <7339@lanl.gov> <1990Nov30.145649.17688@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Nov30.163613.9562@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
Sender: John K. Prentice
Organization: Amparo Corporation, Albuquerque, NM
Lines: 27

In article <1990Nov30.163613.9562@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) writes:
>
>                                      	...When the time comes, I may
>even ask some of you what language you think is appropriate.  Until
>then, I don't want your silly-ass opinion.  If you want to compare
>languages, do it on comp.lang.misc where someone cares ...
>

This is bunk in my opinion, and I happen to be a "fairly typical"
Fortran programmer.  Scientists cannot bury the head in the sand
in a rapidly changing field like computation, no matter how much
time it can take or how distracting it can be.  It is exactly this
kind of attitude that is the cause of so much of the garbage Fortran
that is written.  If these people were using C, it would probably be
garbage C.  Scientists need to be aware of these language issues and
be receptive to new ideas.  What are you doing to do when you find
yourself writing code for a 64,000 processor Connection Machine?  You
may find that the choice of programming language makes a big
difference.  And the day is not far off that parallel machines are
going to be where most scientific computation is going to be done.
This news group strikes me as quite appropiate for these language discussions
since it is read by exactly the audience most affected by these
developments in computers.

John Prentice
Amparo Corporation
john@unmfys.unm.edu