Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!samsung!umich!sharkey!metapyr!chris
From: chris@metapyr.UUCP (Chris Collins)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Educating FORTRAN programmers to use C
Message-ID: <170@metapyr.UUCP>
Date: 10 Jan 90 14:44:46 GMT
References: <1016@sdrc.UUCP> <1990Jan6.003158.2039@aqdata.uucp> <1024@sdrc.UUCP> <167@metapyr.UUCP> <15078@bfmny0.UU.NET>
Reply-To: chris@metapyr.UUCP (Chris Collins)
Organization: Meta Systems, Ltd. -- Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 25

In article <15078@bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:
>
>In article <167@metapyr.UUCP> chris@metapyr.UUCP (Chris Collins) writes:
>>My organization is in the midst of going thourgh just this painful process,
>>of replacing our existing base of 500000 or so lines of Fortran with 
>>C software.  
>
>Why, pray tell, is C inherently more modifiable[!] or maintainable than
>Fortran?
>

Your points are well taken, but remember here that we are talking
about Fortran 4, which is at least being "deprecated".  We've had
more than one platform require special modifications because Fortran
4 was not supported anymore.

Also, we've found that it's faster to write C than to write Fortran 4,
for our programmers.  Even the "hard-liners", of which I was/am includec,
found that we could be as productive in C quite quickly.

Our other major reason for changing is that it was clear that we had to
add major functional changes, and these required several architecture
changes to the whole system.

Chris Collins                      chris@metapyr