Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att-cb!att-ih!alberta!auvax!willis
From: willis@auvax.UUCP (Tony Willis)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: FORTRAN horrors
Keywords: FORTRAN, c, Pl/1
Message-ID: <584@auvax.UUCP>
Date: 1 Apr 88 04:07:44 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: Athabasca U., Alberta, Canada
Lines: 24

I think you people who were debating the relative merits of FORTRAN vs C
should go off and learn PL/1! Let's face facts: PL/1 offers pretty well
all the features of C (bit manipulations, dynamic memory allocation,
string handling, pointers, etc) that C lovers
would claim FORTRAN lacks; on the other hand PL/1 offers
all the features of FORTRAN (complex arithmetic, wide range of math
functions) that FORTRAN lovers would claim C lacks.

Soo, how come PL/1 never became more popular (at least in North
America - it did become fairly popular in Europe where it was designed).
The answer would seem that a language which has "everything" just
becomes so large and bulky that good compilers were difficult to
design and implement. Too bad: I've used Pl/1 on a number of engineering
projects and I kind of liked it.

No flames please :-) 


Tony Willis
 
Athabasca University          ...{ubc-vision,ihnp4}!alberta!auvax!willis  uucp
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