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<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/13/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Lombard, David N</b> <<a href="mailto:dnlombar@ichips.intel.com">dnlombar@ichips.intel.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">On Tue, Mar 13, 2007 at 12:33:50PM -0500, Peter St. John wrote:<br>> Brown Dai-Sensei-Sama,<br>><br>
[deletia]<br>><br>> Re: FORTRAN, for awhile there we didn't really compile it, but translate it<br>> to C and then invoke the C compiler. That gets you the beauty of the IMSL<br>> libraries and the efficiency of very sharply maintained C compilers, at the
<br>> same time.<br><br>Hmm, FORTRAN was around long before C was even a gleam in Dennis' eyes ;)</blockquote>
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<div>Well sure; I learned FORTRAN myself only in 75, but it's from the 50's, and Ken wrote B in the late 60's (to extend your "gleam in the eye" metaphor beyond bearability, I'd say that Dennis carred the project to term). Nice thing about B is that the formal definition fits in 2 pages.
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<div>So by "for awhile" I meant long ago (e.g. f77) but not **that** long ago.</div>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">> Is there a good extant FORTRAN compiler? I wonder why, fortran is<br>> easy to express in C (unlike conceptually variant languages, like APL or
<br>> LISP).<br><br>Actually, outstanding Fortran compilers are available today. As for why,<br>"expressable in another language" shouldn't be confused in any way, shape, or<br>form with "performs well another language."
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<div>I had thought that after some point (say, f77) the practical thing was to translate fortran to C and use the C compiler, just because compiler writers love C, adopted it hugely, and write great compilers. Apparently I was mistaken.
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<div>But do we want to advise Kyle to learn FORTRAN? granted (as others have pointed out) FORTRAN (and I"m glad somebody capitalizes it the old way as I do) forces some discipline particularly apropos to computational efficiency, but libraries have been written to do that. If I wanted to multiply matrices, I wouldn't write my own with arrays of pointers, but would download a library. Unless I needed to tweak some minute thing; then yeah, I'd write it like FORTRAN, but I'd write it in C.
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">--<br>David N. Lombard, Intel, Irvine, CA<br>I do not speak for Intel Corporation; all comments are strictly my own.
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