Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!olivea!apple!usc!almaak.usc.edu!ajayshah
From: ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Missing the whole point (the Fortran vs. C debate)
Message-ID: <28548@usc>
Date: 1 Dec 90 08:06:04 GMT
Sender: news@usc
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 36
Nntp-Posting-Host: almaak.usc.edu
Originator: ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu


I think this thread is missing the whole point in this debate
in arguing about C vs. Fortran on efficiency alone.  Most of the
people involved in this debate get annual paychecks > $50k
(conservative) and therein lies the major point.  The way things
are going, hardware is doubling in speed every 2 to 2.5 years
while holding costs roughly constant.  Languages and systems
which help me get my next Maximum Likelihood program debugged and
running in the shortest possible time are of essence here, not
grubby differences between optimisers.

Face it: optimisers can give you 2x gains *at best*.  Hardly the
kind of thing to be basing an entire computational strategy on.

The essential reason why I get repelled fortran, dusty decks 
in fortran and the mindset of traditional (read: went to graduate
school before 1975) fortran programmers is the terrible
look-and-feel.  Beautiful (read: efficient on my time)
programming comes with a rich appreciation of how algorithms +
data structures makes programs, in careful attention to the way
modules interact, in fine-tuning the scope and visibility of data
across modules, in building really reuseable modules with sterile
interfaces, etc.  This whole mindset is not supported nor
encouraged by fortran and old fortran code and old fortran
programmers, to whom everything is a problem for a few for loops
and common-equivalence parameter passing.  I've seen
single-file-programs in fortran written two years ago (not the
dark ages of the 60s) of 10000 lines!  (not more than a few
hundred lines of comments, obviously).  That is disastrous, and
that is the essence of the problem to me.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________________
Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
                              The more things change, the more they stay insane.
_______________________________________________________________________________


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com