C vs. FORTRAN

[Steven Ryan]

This was all started when somebody referred to braindead fortran programmers
who refuse to use a better structured language (better, not perfect). My point
has always been fortran is used for a purpose and anybody criticising fortran
should be propose a specific replacement that does what fortran does good
better. C, as it currently stands, does not.

Once people start claiming the difference is insignificant, that the gain in
clarity more than offsets the loss of cycles, then the same argument can
be used against C. Other languages are even better structured and more
secure than C. So what a small loss of machine cycles?

>>Actually, the real discussion is why does C have such a crippled argument
>>list? It is possible to pass a list of argument descriptors. The descriptor
>>list can be staticcally created and the overhead is just a register load
>>of a relocated address.
>
>What's the big deal? You can do that already in C.

The big deal is that anything that can be done in C can be done in
fortran--it's just a question of how understandable is the resulting
muckety mess.