What should be added to C

[D Gary Grady]

Right now Fortran has four things over C:

o A richer set of floating point operators, including exponentiation and
  the so-called "in-line" functions (many of which ARE in C).

o A way of passing different-sized multidimensional arrays to the same
  subroutine.  (For instance, right now it is not possible to write a
  function in C that will invert a matrix of arbitrary size without use
  of some "trick," like making the incoming matrix one-dimensional and
  hard-coding the subscript computation or using arrays of pointers to
  pointers.)

o A very well-standardized set of subroutines and functions for
  scientific and engineering use.

o COMPLEX type.

C++ (with which I am unfamiliar) solves some of these problems, I
believe.  For instance, it is possible to do operator overloading, so
the COMPLEX type can be implemented in a fashion similar to Ada's.
-- 
D Gary Grady
Duke U Comp Center, Durham, NC  27706
(919) 684-3695
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