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From: arritt@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: a secular response to the religious conflict
Message-ID: <27304.27610742@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu>
Date: 8 Dec 90 21:31:14 GMT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services
Lines: 34

One of the frustrations of practicing scientists who are genuinely
interested in learning about C (or any other potentially useful
computational technique, for that matter) is that it's difficult to
get information that is both objective and understandable.  When I've
tried to learn about these things, the responses are generally of
two broad types:

1. "You actually program in Fortran ???  Wow, you must be either
    older than John von Neumann, or you're really stupid !!!  
    EVERYBODY knows that C (or whatever) is the only thing to use !!!
    And if you have to ask why, you must be **REALLY** stupid !!!"

2. "C has several powerful features.  One is the ability to create a
    flat addressed pointer to a multiply pipelined data structure
    having recursive kludge-foobar interdependence with the gallium
    arsenide WYSIWYG SCSI fsck grep awk #include XSendEvent glorp
    sndwk p9eufiwju8429-v n80& @!4%tf8*=  809(*&89kl ji....."


You get the point --- even those of us Fortran dinosaurs who keep an open
mind, often find it nearly impossible to learn about new computational
techniques which might be useful.  Can anyone recommend a concise, readable
explanation of the benefits of C for the practicing scientist (NOT the
professional programmer)?  If C has the potential to make my life easier,
I'd like to know.
________________________________________________________________________
Raymond W. Arritt                     | 
Assistant Professor                   |
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy        |  "everyone knew that as time went
Univ. of Kansas                       |   by they'd get a little bit older
Lawrence, KS  66045                   |   and a little bit slower..."
arritt@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu             |               
arritt@ukanvax.bitnet                 |