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From: dgary@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: FORTRAN vs. C:  the REAL reason FORTRAN is still alive
Message-ID: <2868@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jul-84 15:15:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.2868
Posted: Mon Jul  9 15:15:04 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Jul-84 03:38:30 EDT
References: callan.174
Lines: 17

<>
This business on numerical accuracy is a VERY important point often overlooked
even by scientific programmers.  A recent Scientific American had an article
that did accuracy comparisons of various machines and languages.  CDC FORTRAN
was something like 8 orders of magnitude (!) better than IBM PC BASIC.  The
winning calculator was a TI (this surprised me) and the runner up was an HP
followed very closely by a Sharp.  The calculators were much better
than the micros tested but not as good as the CDC, which is as one
would expect.  More impressive is the fact that double precision
FORTRAN was not much more accurate than single precision on the CDC,
suggesting they are doing everything in double precision (a reasonable
choice for number crunching architecture, I would imagine).

D Gary Grady
Duke University Computation Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-4146
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