Programming Language History
Kevin D. Clark
kevin_d_clark at comcast.net
Thu Dec 8 10:46:01 EST 2005
Paul Lussier writes:
>> You can argue about the words "common use", but you should not argue
>> too loudly in the high performance computing arenas, nor in the
>> business circles.
>
> Two areas I know almost nothing about, so, with all due respect for
> those areas of computer science, I'll stop arguing ;)
FYI: there is a huge body of high-performance, heavy-duty math code
out in the world that is written in Fortran. And it is still used and
updated on a daily basis.
Why not port it to C? Because, for a lot of reasons (see [1] for
example), Fortran's performance in this space continues to exceed
C-based implementations.
I'm a C guy myself (when I'm not hacking Perl...), and I wouldn't
especially look forward to working on a project that used Fortran
([2]), but I have to admit that Fortran is very hard to beat in this
space.
Regards,
--kevin
[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html
[2] In fact, for my last Fortran-related project, I just resorted to
using f2c and this was good enough to let me move on to other
things.
--
GnuPG ID: B280F24E
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