Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!marob!djs!samperi From: samperi@djs.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical analysis Message-ID: <177@djs.UUCP> Date: 1 Sep 88 03:52:51 GMT References: <893@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <3064@lanl.gov> Reply-To: samperi@djs.UUCP (Dominick Samperi) Organization: Village Software Lines: 37 In article <3064@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes: |The fact that C parenthesis don't force execution order is sufficient |to exclude C from use [for numerical analysis] in some instances. |J. Giles |Los Alamos This is no longer true for the draft-proposed ANSI C standard (which should be adopted shortly). The following is taken from the second edition of Kernighan and Ritchie's text on C (Page 260): o A compiler's license to treat mathematically associative operators as computationally associative is revoked [in the new standard]. Other features of the new standard that may be of interest are: o All floating point values are no longer automatically converted to double in expressions; instead, values are promoted, if necessary, to the smallest capacious-enough type. o The notion of a "function prototype" is introduced. It permits the programmer to declare the data type of function formal parameters in a way that enables the compiler to check the actual parameters in each invocation of the function for type consistency. o The Standard places explicit minima on the ranges of the arithmetic types, and mandates headers ( and ) giving the characteristics of each particular implementation. o The minimum significance of all internal identifiers is increased to 31 characters (but the smallest mandated significance of external identifiers - names of FORTRAN subroutines, for example - remains at 6 monocase letters). -- Dominick Samperi samperi@acf8.nyu.edu uunet!hombre!samperi cmcl2!acf8!samperi rutgers!acf8.nyu.edu!samperi (^ ell)