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From: lee@diane.uucp (Leonid Poslavsky)
Newsgroups: comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Cynic's Guide to Software Engineering, part 3
Message-ID: <458@ndcheg.UUCP>
Date: 21 Apr 88 01:35:14 GMT
References: <39501UH2@PSUVM> <2636@Shasta.STANFORD.EDU> <1950@rtech.UUCP> <4962@pucc.Princeton.EDU>
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In article <4962@pucc.Princeton.EDU>, EGNILGES@pucc.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
> In article <39501UH2@PSUVM>, UH2@PSUVM.BITNET (Lee Sailer) writes:
>  
>One of the reasons physicists need super computers is that they usually haven't
>>a clue about using data structures to implement sophisticated
>>algorithms.  Most P's do most everything by brute force.  Partly, this
>>is because FORTRAN makes it so hard to implement clever code.
>  
>    "In the good old days physicists repeated each other's
>     experiments, just to be sure.  Today they stick to FORTRAN,
>     so that they can share each other's programs, bugs
>     included."

In reality there large libs of greatly optimized code for just about any
mathematical operation. And should you wish to write a structure dependent 
program in FORTRAN all that is required is the ingenuity.
E.g. : a couple of years ago I asked some undergrads in the CS department
as to how they would process a couple of trees which have joined branches
(any offshoot of one tree can be connected or disconnected to the root of
another). None of the 5 people I asked could do this. The problem was that
they were only familiar with Pascal and C and applicable methodologies for
tree parsing. 

By the way the solution is very easy if instead of pointers you use integer
arrays, or to be very extravagant use array of pointers.

Thus, FORTRAN has its advantages : it forces one to evaluate ones options !!!


Lee (Captain)
U. of Notre Dame
BITNET: gba6bc