Any decent Fortrans under Unix ? Which machine ?

[Geoff Kuenning]

In article <210 at bu-cs.UUCP> bzs at bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:

> What good is it to have a great optimizer on a slow machine?

The problem people are forgetting here is numerical accuracy.  As Gene
Spafford pointed out a few months back, there are *no* current Unix
Fortrans that have numerically accurate libraries (I/O is, as usual,
especially weak).  Many people stick with their Cray, CDC, or DEC Fortran
because those companies have put many buckos into accuracy, unlike Bell
Labs who merely dabbled in it.  I have no doubt AT&T will eventually
correct this problem on the 3B line, but since it's highly machine-dependent
(is the 3B IEEE?) AT&T's good work will not automatically carry over to
all the private-hardware vendors.

What good is it to have a speedier machine if the answers are wrong?
-- 

	Geoff Kuenning
	{hplabs,ihnp4}!trwrb!desint!geoff