Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!sco!seanf
From: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran vs C for computations
Message-ID: <1225@scolex>
Date: 11 Sep 88 19:58:12 GMT
References: <962@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <3290@lanl.gov> <3169@emory.uucp>
Reply-To: seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan)
Organization: The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc.
Lines: 24

In article <3169@emory.uucp> platt@emory.UUCP (Dan Platt) writes:
>>#ifdef is an admission that your compiler isn't any good.  If the
>>conditional expression is a constant, a normal if statement should 
>>be optimized so that code is only generated for the active branch.  If
>>the conditional expression is not a constant, it couldn't be used as
>>part of an #ifdef either. 
[sorry, don't have the original author's name.  Somebody from Los Alamos, I
think]

This is *wrong*.  Take, for example, GNU EMACS.  #if's and #ifdef's all over
the place.  Why?  Different machines (and OS's) have different include
files, different structure names, etc.  For example, terminal control on BSD
is quite different from terminal control on System V Release anything
(except 4, I guess); the structure names, include files, and structure
elements are different.  The compiler will *not* allow you to use an
undefined structure element (such as foo.bar);  this is correct.

However, thinking like that is part of FORTRAN's problem.  Sigh.


-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "Joy is in the ears that hear, not in the mouth that speaks"
seanf@sco.UUCP   |     -- Saltheart Foamfollower (S. R. Donaldson)
(408) 458-1422   | Any opinions expressed are my own, not my employers'.