Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Path: utzoo!utgpu!radio!brian
From: brian@radio.uucp (Brian Glendenning)
Subject: Re: Fortran vs C for computations
Message-ID: <1988Sep18.125342.2903@radio.uucp>
In-reply-to: gl8f@bessel.acc.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Reply-To: brian@radio.astro.toronto.edu (Brian Glendenning)
Organization: Radio Astronomy, University of Toronto
References: <391@quintus.UUCP> <3494@lanl.gov> <1510@ficc.uu.net> <559@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>
Date: Sun, 18-Sep-88 12:53:42 EDT

In article <559@hudson.acc.virginia.edu>, gl8f@bessel (Greg Lindahl) writes:
>In article <1510@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>>
>> [stuff deleted]
>>
>> There is no standard program available with all Fortran compilers that
>> does preprocessing of the program (conditional compilation, etc).
>
>One large image processing package (AIPS) is written in FORTRAN and is
>portable across all kinds of environments -- VAX/VMS, Unix V and 4.X,
>Crays (COS and Unicos), etc.

It is true that AIPS is only preprocessed to do fairly trivial things (put in
common block declarations, change ENCODE statements to in-core writes etc).
Howerver to use aips as an example of FORTRAN portability isn't really fair
since the lower level calls are often not in fortran (largely C for unix
systems), and on those machines where it is fortran, it is in a very extended
fortran.

This is nothing against AIPS. It is a multi-tasking image processing "operating
system" with it's own file system etc. Fortran isn't the best language to
implement low level OS structure.
-- 
	  Brian Glendenning - Radio astronomy, University of Toronto
brian@radio.astro.toronto.edu uunet!utai!radio!brian  glendenn@utorphys.bitnet