Re: Three liars, in FORTRAN [long]

[Gary Karshner <karshner@STMARYTX.EDU>]

James,
        A little ancient computer history, C was originally written to write
an operating system (Unix) and as such it has to have good I/O capability
and be machine independent (easily transferred from one machine to another).
The much older FORTRAN was written in machine language and a great deal of
work was done on how to optimize it for a given machine. Speed was not a
major issue with early C, and the result was that in comparing early
versions of both fortran was much faster. One case I was involved with it
was close to two to one. Then the computer people decided to write FORTRAN
in C (Machine independence), these versions were typically no better then C
in speed. So you have to be careful when you compare the two.
        The main reason FORTRAN still survives is that many of us have a
large investment in Fortran routines, the language is well adapted to
mathematical calculations (It has straight forward matrix handling and
complex numbers).
Whereas in C programs, I find myself spending a lot of time worrying about
what functions are passing each other and not what they are doing.

        I hope this helps.

Gary

> Huh?  I thought that the original attraction of C was that it was
> very "close to the machine", compared to comtemporaries FORTRAN and
> Pascal.  It has things like an increment operator, which machine language
> does but FORTRAN doesn't.  On the other hand, FORTRAN has built-in output
> functions, while the C language itself does not (the C input/output
> routines are actually in standard libraries, sort of like software
> plugins).
>
> I didn't know about the speed advantage FORTRAN still has.  Could it be due
> to FORTRAN being more focused on floating point math?
>
> --
> --James McLean
> jmclean@chem.ucsd.edu
> post doc
> UC San Diego, Chemistry
Gary Karshner

St. Mary's University
San Antonio, Texas
KARSHNER@STMARYTX.EDU