Programming Language History

Michael Costolo michael.costolo at gmail.com
Thu Dec 8 20:53:00 EST 2005


On 12/8/05, Kevin D. Clark <kevin_d_clark at comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> 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.



Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to recall that Fortran has built in
support for complex numbers and C does not.  That can make life much easier
when dealing with "heavy duty" math common in scientific and engineering
applications.  I can remember back to graduate school where I had to write a
program to solve a particular problem for a quantum mechanics course.  All I
had to work with was Pascal, and after failing to successfully write a
complex matrix multiplication subroutine, I gave up.  Interestingly, I
managed to get more points for code that would not compile than for a
compiled program that had a math error and gave the wrong results.

-Mike-
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