Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!yale!cmcl2!beta!a!jlg
From: jlg@a.UUCP (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: FORTRAN Horror
Message-ID: <538@a.UUCP>
Date: 25 Mar 88 03:28:39 GMT
References: <24861@yale-celray.yale.UUCP> <1135@pembina.UUCP> <2596@pdn.UUCP> <20821@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 21
Summary: Has nothing to do with Fortran!

In article <20821@bu-cs.BU.EDU>, bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
> 
> Yes, I agree that many FORTRAN users are obsessed with performance and
> some are good at getting it. Unfortunately many aren't, grad students
> in the sciences often have little training in programming and
> algorithms and issues like accuracy vs precision. More importantly
> they don't know what's important and often don't ask the right
> questions.
[... with specific examples]

It's possible to write bad code in any language.  If someone doesn't
know about quicksort, he may write a very bad sort algorithm in Pascal,
C, Ada, ....  The fact that grad students don't know much about program-
ming is NOT a reason to teach them C instead of Fortran.  If their
programming projects are full of scientific number-crunching, Fortran
is the best language for the job.  If they have trouble implementing
efficient code, teach them programming - using whatever language that
is suited to their work.

J. Giles
Los Alamos