Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!nrl-cmf!cmcl2!phri!marob!samperi
From: samperi@marob.MASA.COM (Dominick Samperi)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran versus C for numerical analysis
Message-ID: <408@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 9 Sep 88 13:43:27 GMT
References: <1421@ficc.uu.net> <3349@lanl.gov>
Reply-To: samperi@marob.masa.com (Dominick Samperi)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 42

In article <3349@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>the rules of C (there are rules in C?) do.  The problem with C is that
>it provides _no_ way to force a given order of expression evaluation

But you criticized C (ANSI C) for forcing a left-to-right evaluation order
in expressions like a+b+c+d in a previous posting. The beauty of C stems
from the mathematical consistency of its rules; the new (strict)
associativity rules for mathematical expressions is a natural extension
of the associativity rules for the non-mathematical C operators, which
enable the programmer to predict exactly how an expression will be
evaluated.

True, ANSI C is not yet an "official" standard, but neither is the current C,
yet the current language has undergone very few changes in 10+ years of use.
I maintain that the reason for this remarkable stability is the mathematical
consistency of the language, together with its fine data structuring
capabilities, and its low-level features (which facilitate the design of
portable code).

ANSI conformant C compilers are already in existence, and I suspect that
most C compilers will conform to this standard in the near future, even
if the standard is never published! (Well, one might say that it has
already been published, in the Second Edition of K&R's text, which has been
the definitive working standard for the last 10 years.)

I'm sure that the new FORTRAN standard will address many of the shortcommings
of the language: no support for data abstraction (no data structuring tools),
no support for information hiding (all function identifiers are globally
accessible), no recursion, identifiers limited to 6 characters, automatic
variable typing via the "first letter rule," ambiguous or inconsistent
specs. (the simple operators associate left-to-right, except for **, which
associates right-to-left, but forget this because the compiler can do
what it pleases for optimization...), programming guidelines made part
of the language spec., etc. 

Unfortunately, last I heard was that this new FORTRAN standard is not likely to
appear for a long time, due to the inability of the committee to
agree on anything.
-- 
Dominick Samperi, NYC
    samperi@acf8.NYU.EDU	samperi@marob.MASA.COM
    cmcl2!phri!marob        	uunet!hombre!samperi
      (^ ell)