Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!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: <16768@csli.Stanford.EDU> Date: 6 Dec 90 22:26:36 GMT References: <16671@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1990Dec5.022302.25764@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <16725@csli.Stanford.EDU> <1990Dec5.185852.5191@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U. Lines: 16 In article peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes: > >Imagine if UNIX was written in Ratfor. Well, I don't know if that is a fair comparison to C++. Anyhow, if you want to see a big complex program that IS written in Ratfor, among other things, look at the sources for S (the statistics/graphics language from Bell Labs). S has lots of good ideas, but the source is gross. I remember installing it on a VAX 11/750 running 4.2BSD UNIX. The 4.2 f77 compiler didn't work so you had to install a hacked version of the 4.1 compiler. To make S you needed the newer version of the m4 macro processor, which wasn't distributed with 4.2. It was on the S dist tape, but there were no instructions telling you to install it. Etc. When you finally got everything figured out, with all of that preprocessing it took something like 12 hours to compile. Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com