Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!killer!elg
From: elg@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Stone Knives And Bear Skins (was Re: FORTRAN Lament)
Message-ID: <6779@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 14 Jan 89 05:23:19 GMT
References: <2401@garth.UUCP>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 45

in article <2401@garth.UUCP>, phipps@garth.UUCP (Clay Phipps) says:
> In article <117400003@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu> gsg0384@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>> ... I think we, stone-age FORTRAN programmers, 
>>usually physicists, mechanical engineers, and civil engineers, 
>>need [dynamic *local* array sizing] desperately.
>>... Too often I cannot help thinking that the CStists do research 
>>on what they like to do, but not on what most users want them to do.  
>>The result is that we still don't have a language any better than 
>>FORTRAN 77 for our purpose, ...
> Workable solutions were supplied by a language designed 
> initially under the name FORTRAN VI in the early 1960s.
> So many changes were made away from the Spirit of FORTRAN
> that the language was eventually renamed PL/I.
> It's still possible to find PL/I compilers laying around
> for many minis and mainframes.  The language user community you 
> identified chose to stick with FORTRAN, rather than switch to PL/I.

A slight note for PL/1 advocates: PL/1 will do almost ANYTHING --
everything that Fortran will do, and everything that Cobol will do.
And do it better, too. 

BUT, there's a side effect there: the language is HUGE. Until Ada, it
was the largest language out there. 

The final effect is that the language is intimidating to learn, and
difficult to build a compiler for.  Compilers for it are either quite
large and slow, or else generate lousy code. I have seen PL/1
compilers generate excellent code, as good as Fortran or whatever, but
not without the compiler spending large amounts of space & time to do
it.

People who advocate PL/1 as a replacement for Fortran should be trying
to sell dehumidifyers in Nevada. 

Re: lament of physicist types that there's no real replacement for
Fortran: anybody have a counterexample? Anybody have a compiler which
is as good for numerical work, and generates code as fast and
efficient? PLUS, is small enough so not to intimidate the
non-professional programmers?

--
Eric Lee Green    ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg
          Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509              
Netter A: In Hell they run VMS.
Netter B: No.  In Hell, they run MS-DOS.  And you only get 256k.