Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!joyce!ames!hc!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran vs C for computations
Message-ID: <3448@lanl.gov>
Date: 12 Sep 88 21:08:56 GMT
References: <1226@scolex>
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Lines: 19

From article <1226@scolex>, by seanf@sco.COM (Sean Fagan):
> 
> This is the whole point.  The preprocessor (which you call unnecessary),
                                              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> [...]

Wrong.  Read what I said.  I never called the preprocessor unnecessary.
I said the preprocessor was _not_ relevant to the choice of language
since _any_ language can be preprocessed.  I was also pointing out that
for many of the uses of #ifdefs, a smart compiler would do the same job.

People keep saying that Fortran has no preprocessor.  This is _not_
true.  Preprocessing is a textual substitution problem.  It can be done
on _any_ sufficiently powerful text editor.  Not only that, cpp can usually
be applied to any text file you have - including Fortran code.  A pre-
processor _is_ unnecessary in a language standard - in fact, standardizing
would only complicate the compiler writer's job without actually enhancing
the language at all.

J. Giles