Fortran vs. C for numerical work

[Stephen Clamage]

ghe at comphy.physics.orst.edu (Guangliang He) writes:

>In article <BGLENDEN.90Nov21003342 at mandrill.cv.nrao.edu> bglenden at mandrill.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes:
>>
>>It is often stated that Fortran is better than C for numerical work...

>It may not be true any more. A friend of mine brought a little fortran
>program ...
>the excutable from C is faster than the excutable from Fortran by a few percent

What we have here is an example of one program compiled by one FORTRAN
compiler and a translation of that program compiled by one C compiler.
Comparison of the execution speeds of the two programs on one machine
cannot lead to any valid conclusions about the relative utility of the
two languages for numerical work.

FORTRAN has a large body of standard libraries for numerical work whose
operation and reliability have been well-tested for many years.  This
cannot be said for C, although some multi-language evironments allow
such FORTRAN libraries to be called from C programs.

The utility of a language must be judged by more criteria than just
execution speed of one sample program.
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve at taumet.com