Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: FORTRAN Horror
Message-ID: <10037@steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 22 Mar 88 17:20:02 GMT
References: <24861@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1135@pembina.UUCP> <2424@saturn.ucsc.edu> <25461@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 22


  The arithmetic if is one of the few good things in FORTRAN, and one I
miss in C every time I write some form of sort or tree search. There is
no clean way to do what the IF allows, ie. to make two conditional jumps
based on a single compare instruction. Yes, I know it's not a big
overhead in the scheme of things, but the IF is a representation of
something which you really want to do in useful programs.

  Of course I wouldn't suggest having it be implemented as goto's, but
some reasonable syntax, such as:
	evaluate (fun(4,"test") < 22)
	{ < 0 action }
	{ equal action }
	{ > 0 action }

  I am not really suggesting adding this to any language, but it allows
telling the compiler what you want in a way which allows generation of
good code.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me