Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!hubcap!fpst
From: fpst@hubcap.UUCP (Steve Stevenson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 88
Message-ID: <3314@hubcap.UUCP>
Date: 21 Oct 88 17:00:55 GMT
References: <977@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Distribution: comp.lang.fortran
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 21

From article <977@l.cc.purdue.edu>, by cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin):
> The only penalties for increasing the size of the language are the size, and
> to a lesser extent the speed, of the compiler.

Believe that PL/I will show you quite differently.  The cost of very
large languages is in the generality of the underlying coding structures.
These are hidden from all but the compiler types.  You're being naive.

> All of the present languages deny the programmer the power of the machine.
> If execution time is at all important, this is criminal.  Machine structure
> is simpler than Fortran (any machine).

For von Neumann machines, this probably is not the case (Fortran).  It WILL
be the case when y'all start trying to force a von Neumann language
to do distributed processing.

-- 
Steve Stevenson                            fpst@hubcap.clemson.edu
(aka D. E. Stevenson),                     fpst@prism.clemson.csnet
Department of Computer Science,            comp.parallel
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell