From: i2041101@rzphy2.rz.tu-bs.de (Paulini)
Subject: Re: C versus FORTRAN debate (WAS: Re: Welcome to HPFF
Keywords: HPFF, High Performance Fortran
Organization: TU Braunschweig, Informatik, Bueltenweg, Germany
Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1992 17:22:19 GMT

Sorry, but it was'nt my intention to start a debate C vs. FORTRAN. That would
be silly and a waste of time. "Cut it", as someone has said.

The essence of my article was: don't try to add completely new features to
FORTRAN like parallel processes and so on. My proposal was to declare a language
(lets call it NEW_LANG) as the successor of FORTRAN. NEW_LANG can have all the
new features required together with a portable interface to FORTRAN, so that
it is possible to use all existing FORTRAN code. 

What else have the creators of Fortran 90 done? In fact it is a completely
new language. But they stopped half the way, because old FORTRAN code is still
legal; and it is not possible to combine both a safe, secure, elegant and
efficient language and the old FORTRAN style. BTW, we all know how unsafe, 
insecure, inelegant and inefficient programming in FORTRAN is (i don't mean
ineffiecient in the sense of slow execution). Fortran 90 - Syntax seems very 
complex to me and it is probably not easy to make an efficient compiler
(here i mean efficient _also_ in the sense of execution time).

IMHO the creation of a NEW_LANG seems to me the best possibility to solve
the REAL problem we all have: writing numeric code. We all know that Standard
FORTRAN (i don't speak of non-portrable extensions like VAX-FORTRAN) is in
many ways a very poor language (for instance: remember the discussion in 
comp.lang.fortran some weeks ago about a portable way to append something
to an existing file - there is no way). I mentioned C and Ada only because
they are very popular and dont't have most of the problems FORTRAN has -
they have other. In the last years many numeric code has been written in C
and it is the most popular programming language in the world. Most of the young
people entering our institute are used to C and i forced some of them to use
FORTRAN, although they disliked FORTRAN very much (like me), but at the 
moment there is no other way to solve some of the numeric problems we have.
But times change and if i look into the market i see some probability that 
C will dominate over FORTRAN also in numeric applications. Don't misunderstand
me: i don't think that C is the ever best possible language. I think there
are better programming tools available (but don't say which, to not have
another useless discussion).

Good postings should not be larger than my editing window - so i stop here.
Thanks!

-- 
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# Joachim Paulini                                                             #
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