Programming Language History

[Kevin D. Clark]

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.

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