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From: gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: Anyone volunteer to do Fortran vs. C on SPECmarks?
Message-ID: <1990Dec19.032301.4449@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 19 Dec 90 03:23:01 GMT
References: <1990Dec11.163826.5439@eagle.lerc.nasa.gov> <1990Dec15.094523.10622@groucho> <111621@convex.convex.com>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
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There has been an ongoing debate for umpteen years about whether
Fortran or C is more appropriate for modern numerical programs. While
your choice of language is often determined by what the problem needs,
there have also been claims that "C isn't much worse than Fortran on
even problems which Fortran well", and so on. These arguments never
get anywhere because I haven't seen anyone take some real numerical
applications and compare.

So let's try to generate some proof. SPEC contains a bunch of programs
written in Fortran which do Fortran-type things. f2c is a fortran-to-c
translator which seems very robust.

Anyone volunteer to run SPEC through f2c and report times for Fortran
and C on a variety of boxes?