Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!tank!ncar!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!microsoft!bobal
From: bobal@microsoft.UUCP (Bob Allison)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN 88
Message-ID: <1128@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 28 Oct 88 15:13:34 GMT
Article-I.D.: microsof.1128
References: <5833@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> <7540@megaron.arizona.edu> <5838@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Reply-To: bobal@microsoft.UUCP (Bob Allison (uunet!microsoft!bobal))
Distribution: comp.lang.fortran
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 26

In article <5838@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> lamson@sierra.uucp (scott h lamson) writes:
> [...]
>be a problem.  Your opinion may differ, but I don't care about compile
>time (within one order of magnitude) even though my primary software
>development environment is a sun workstation.  (I guess about two
>orders of magnitude slower than the Cray-2, but I haven't been
>actively benchmarking things lately).
>The language we select as a standard now will be in use from what...
>1990 or 1991 up until 2000??  How many machines in 1995 will be slow
>enough to make compiling F8x a REAL big problem?  
>

Well, you may not care about compile time, but what about execution time.
I can personally guarantee that, if you use array expressions, running
any reasonable 8X program will be at least 25% slower than an equivalent 
program written in 77 (to avoid an often belabored point: if such a 
program can be written in 77).  I can make this statement with confidence 
for FORTRAN compilers on the PC, probably until at least 1995.  Many other 
scalar machines will be in the same boat.

I agree that machines will speed up by more than 25% in the interim, but
most people don't buy a machine which runs 25% faster just so their software
can run as fast as it used to.  They buy the machine so THEIR software runs
25% faster.

Bob Allison