Re: Which programming Language
On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 11:57:42PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
> Just for the record, Fortran is very much alive and kicking. It's actually a
> wonderful language for mathematical work and HPC. It's just no longer a hype
> word. And I'm mostly talking about fortran 90/95. Fortran 77 is a bit archaic.
> I am hoping that a fortran 2008 compiler will come out soon and that has object
> oriented paradigms. Maybe part of the problem is the lack of a
> cheap/free/accessible compiler for windows as the intel compiler rather
> expensive, but HPC is much more linux/unix based anyway.
I agree that Fortran is alive and kicking. I still have some Fortran77
code. I'm sure there are still billions of lines of Fortran code
running on older systems. In many engineering fields, the ability to do
basic stuff with fortran77 was (is?) a basic job requirement simply
because of all the legacy code out there.
The numerical/HPC domain was also one considered when Ada was created.
Think about computer modeling of the performance of a new submarine.
(As a historical/literature note, in Tom Clancy's Hunt for Red October,
Skip Taylor takes a submarine computer model, translates it into Ada for
use on a Navy Cray, in order to predict the performance of the new
Catepillar Drive on Red October).
While Ada's run-time checks may cause some overhead, they can be turned
off if you want. Since both Fortran and Ada are compiled with gcc's
backend to object code, you can't really say that one language is better
than the other for that domain. However, it could be possible that gcc
is able to produce more efficient code for one language than the other.
This would be the fault of the compiler rather than the language.
Doug.
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