Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!clyde.concordia.ca!ccu.umanitoba.ca!salomon
From: salomon@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Dan Salomon)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Fortran vs. C for numerical work
Message-ID: <1990Dec11.004032.14796@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Date: 11 Dec 90 00:40:32 GMT
References: <2392:Nov2902:59:0590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <7339@lanl.gov> <1990Nov30.145649.17688@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1990Nov30.163613.9562@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> <1980@mts.ucs.UAlberta.CA> <18016@hydra.gatech.EDU> <16671@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Lines: 19

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?

It is not that C's syntax is hard to learn, it is that C is tricky to use.
To convince yourself of this, read Andrew Koenig's book "C Traps and
Pifalls", and try to come up with and equal number of equally serious
traps and pitfalls for FORTRAN.  Your FORTRAN list will certaily not
be empty, but it will not be as long or serious as the one for C.

You can alse read the FAQ list in this news group, and compare it to
the one posted in comp.lang.fortran.  If there is no such posting in
comp.lang.fortran (as I suspect) then try to come up with a similar set
of questions yourself.
-- 

Dan Salomon -- salomon@ccu.UManitoba.CA
               Dept. of Computer Science / University of Manitoba
	       Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada  R3T 2N2 / (204) 275-6682