Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca!mroussel
From: mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel)
Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work
Message-ID: <1990Dec5.022302.25764@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
Organization: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto
References: <1980@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA> <18016@hydra.gatech.EDU> <16671@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 90 02:23:02 GMT

In article <16671@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes
>Would someone care to enlighten me as to why he or she thinks that C has
>a difficult syntax and is difficult to learn?

     Fortran has a relatively simple relation to mathematical formulae.
You write the formula on paper and then transcribe it more or less
directly into your program; this is especially true of Fortran 77 with
it's intelligent type conversions and intrinsic function selection.  The
only thing Fortran 77 doesn't provide that naturally occurs in many
algorithms is recursion, but many compilers handle recursion anyway.
     C on the other hand was not designed for math.  It was designed for
systems programming and any other use is incidental.  It's not so much
that C is difficult, it's that its syntax is unnatural for scientific
programming.  C is a lovely language if you're writing an OS.  I think
that those of us who say that we don't want to learn C because it's
"difficult" really mean this: C is not particularly well-suited to our
purposes so that beating our problem into C would be quite a chore.
     I also think that some of us (myself included) just generally
object to languages that need braces, semicolons or other punctuation to
make the meaning clear.  If you want to see a language with equivalent
functionality to C but with a much cleaner syntax, look at Turing.

				Marc R. Roussel
                                mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca


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