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From: diamond@diamond.csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Calling FORTRAN from C (Was: Need matrix inversion C routine).
Message-ID: <10235@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: 10 May 89 05:21:25 GMT
References: <2846@tank.uchicago.edu> <5785@cbnews.ATT.COM> <10087@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1415@uw-entropy.ms.washington.edu> <17333@mimsy.UUCP> <10228@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> <10237@smoke.BRL.MIL>
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In article <10228@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET> I wrote:
>>When DEC did exactly this, around 10 years ago, luck did not seem to be
>>part of it.

In article <10237@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:

>DEC tried to do it, but I wouldn't call their attempt fully successful.

It would still be silly if someone who wants to reinvent this wheel
doesn't bother to look at what DEC did.

>>... other languages only specified WHAT gets done by various language
>>constructs, but K&R added HOW it must be done for their language.

>I don't know what you mean by this.  Do you?

Yeah, I think so.  Strings, for example.  Cobol, PL/I, Algol,
Fortran-77, Snobol, etc., have string types and say what kind of
operations can be done on strings.  C says that a string is terminated
with a '\0' byte.  Instead of assigning a null string to a target,
C programmers assign a '\0' byte, so the implementation of C library
routines can never be speeded up.  For other languages, improvements
are often made to implementations.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp@relay.cs.net)
  The above opinions are my own.   |  Why are programmers criticized for
  If they're also your opinions,   |  re-inventing the wheel, when car
  you're infringing my copyright.  |  manufacturers are praised for it?