Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!riley
From: riley@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Mixing languages (was Re: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Keywords: FORTRAN PL/I kluge
Message-ID: <6717@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>
Date: 30 Oct 88 16:39:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: batcompu.6717
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: riley@tcgould.tn.cornell.edu (Daniel S. Riley)
Organization: Cornell Theory Center, Cornell University, Ithaca NY
Lines: 24

In article <599@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>In article <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> link@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link) writes:
>>why would CERN, the European particle accelerator establishment, want
>>to throw away all that code?
>As long as they have a compiler for F77, and whatever new language they
>are using will let them mix F77 routines with Utopia-99, why would they
>_have_ to throw away all that code?

Mixing languages in a portable manner is very difficult to do in a 
multi-vendor environment, where the lifetime of the code is often far 
longer than the lifetime of any given cpu.  I can mix languages easily
on our VAX; with a little more effort, I could probably do so in a manner
compatible with Apollo, Sun, etc.  Whatever I do, it's almost guaranteed
not to work on the IBM mainframes.  And our computer acquisition committee
would be very reluctant to restrict all future computer purchases to
vendors with compatible cross-language calling support.  Until there is a
a well supported standard for mixing different languages, mixed language
development is not a viable alternative to a new Fortran standard in a
high-energy physics (e.g. CERN) research environment.

(Personally I'd love to write the occasional routine in C, but our
Software czar would kill me if I tried...)

-Dan Riley (dsr@lns61.tn.cornell.edu, dsr@crnlns.bitnet)
-Wilson Lab, Cornell U.