Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!gatech!emory!platt
From: platt@emory.uucp (Dan Platt)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Should I convert FORTRAN code to C?
Message-ID: <2960@emory.uucp>
Date: 10 Jun 88 05:32:34 GMT
References: <22ad4e5b!4683@snark.UUCP> <5241@ecsvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: platt@emory.UUCP (Dan Platt)
Organization: Emory University
Lines: 59

In article <5241@ecsvax.UUCP> cjl@ecsvax.UUCP (Charles Lord) writes:
>In article <22ad4e5b!4683@snark.UUCP>,eric@snark.UUCP(Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>> I am not aware of a FORTRAN for the Mac. Good FORTRANs do exist for the PC/PS
>> machines (but beware of Microsoft's, which is said to be slow and buggy!).
>
>Since when? perhaps you are confusing MS Fortran with MSC.
>
>I have used MS Fortran from 3.2 to 4.1 and have had
>little to no trouble.  No ad, just a satisfied customer.
>
>Charles Lord
>cjl@ecsvax.UUCP


Actually, I've been quite impressed with the MS Fortran 4.10.  It has a few bugs
(I found one -- there are probably more), but I'm more tolerant of these than
some people are (judging by the flames that  some people have generated and
pointed at microsoft).  The products MS Fortran and MS C are very similar in
quality, speed of compilation and speed of executable code.  The code is 
quite fast for MS Fortran (it beat out MSC and Turbo C for some numerical
procedures that I benchmarked),  and all of these were much faster than
the previous generation of products available for PC/s. 

But not to stray too far from the course, I feel that:

1) the issue is subjective to some extent (hence the lead in "I feel").
	How well do you like fortran?  How well do you like C?  How
	well do the people you work with like Fortran and C?

2) Objective criterea would include:

	a)  How well are the various languages supported in your environment? 
		Does your system have a good C compiler that generates
		fast reliable code?  Does it have good system support 
		(libraries &c)?  If you are doing PC work, there are good
		cheap C compilers that give you a great deal of control over
		your system resources at efficiencies that would have been
		nice some years ago.

	b) How well does your environment support fortran?  In some cases, the
		fortran support is inferior to that provided for C.  In some
		cases, such as IBM 370's, CRAY's, Cybers &c, the Fortran
		compiler will be the best choice.

	c) Who will be using the code?  If it is engineers who are doing and
		have been doing mainly number crunching work, with little or
		no nead for dynamic data structure manipulation, then Fortran
		might be better, and if these people don't know C, it may be
		best to work in fortran --- save lots of lost time and money.
 
There is lots of research being initiated in fortran and work being ported in
fortran --- often dictated by criterea defined in 1, 2b, and 2c.  The work
I've been doing has included both fortran and C coding -- depending on the
application and environment I'm working on --- some of it being duplicated
for various reasons in both languages.

I believe there's room for both languages, and use both.  The rest depends
on the above criterea.

Dan Platt