Xref: utzoo comp.arch:4353 comp.misc:2271
Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!m2c!ulowell!vaxine!agr
From: agr@vaxine.UUCP (Arnold Reinhold)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Fortran summary (was Re: FORTRAN Horror)
Message-ID: <800@vaxine.UUCP>
Date: 14 Apr 88 21:13:54 GMT
References: <2730@saturn.ucsc.edu>
Reply-To: agr@vaxine.cs.ulowell.edu (Arnold Reinhold)
Organization: Automatix Inc.,  Billerica, MA
Lines: 23

In article <2730@saturn.ucsc.edu> haynes@ucscc.UCSC.EDU (Jim Haynes) writes:
>All this has gotten rather far afield from architecture since the

May I suggest that the Fortran debate calls into question one assumption that
underlies the RISC revolution.  Namely that machine architecture can be
trusted to a negotiation between the VLSI designer and the compiler writer.
Since most code will be written in a high level language, the compiler
writer can fully represent the interests of the user community in the design
proces.

The fact that scientific users cannot be weaned from a language designed
thirty one years ago may be a reflection on their pig headedness, but it
may also mean that the computer language community may have failed to
understand or sympathize with their needs.  As a result they may not enjoy
the performance gains touted for RISC.

I would be interested in hearing about benchmarks comparing, say, a Sun 3
and Sun 4 on large scientific applications, especially image processing
operations (e.g. integer convolutions).

Arnold Reinhold
Automatix Inc.
Billerica, Mass. USA