Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!agate!shelby!csli!poser
From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work
Message-ID: <16725@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 90 09:01:53 GMT
References: <1980@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA> <18016@hydra.gatech.EDU> <16671@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1990Dec5.022302.25764@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 12

In article <1990Dec5.022302.25764@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) writes:
>
>     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;

How is C so different? Neither C nor Fortran has much direct math support.
Both have the basic operations in infix form. About the only things I can
thnk of are that the power function is not an operator in C and that
C does not have a complex type. I've never found it at all difficult to
translate equations into C. The main difficulty is avoiding duplicate
computation, and that has to be done explicitly in Fortran too.


Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com