C vs. FORTRAN
Jim Giles
jlg at lanl.gov
Wed Aug 9 06:20:46 AEST 1989
>From article <14523 at bfmny0.UUCP>, by tneff at bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff):
> [...] Software that works right, and early,
> is more important that a shaved MIP. [...]
In that case, Fortran is certainly a better choice than C for most
numerical computations. Fortunately, it also helps if you're after
shaving a few MIPs as well.
The best test for a programming language is that simple concepts should
be simple to represent. For numerical computations, Fortran does this
better than C. Consider, for example, a routine to do matrix multiply
on arbitrary sized and shaped matrices - both C an Fortran require the
programmer to express the iteration explicitly, but only C requires the
index calculations to be done explicitly. C++ does better, but only
if the programmer has implemented a class for matrices and the definitions
of the operations. Still, it's a step in the right direction - when will
we see a Fortran++ ?
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