Fortran vs. C for numerical work (SUMMARY)

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1990Nov30.183032.5420 at ccu.umanitoba.ca> salomon at ccu.umanitoba.ca (Dan Salomon) writes:
>>> 5. There are many numerical libraries written for Fortran.
>>Which, given f2c, is no longer an issue.
>Does f2c handle conformant arrays properly?

I don't recall the fine points, but f2c is a full Fortran 77 "compiler";
if conformant arrays are legal, portable F77, f2c does them.

>If so, is the code that it generates maintainable?

f2c deliberately does not try to generate maintainable code.  That is hard,
and nobody has yet produced a program that can do it without human tinkering
with the output.  In one sense, f2c really ought to be cc2fc -- its primary
mission is to be a pre-pass to turn a C compiler into a Fortran compiler.
Code maintenance is still better done on the Fortran.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry