Subject: still FORTRAN?

From: Irene Newhouse <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 1997 09:44:26 -0500 (CDT)

There ARE reasons why FORTRAN is still used by scientists.  Of course
there's the legacy code argument -- people who don't have time to reinvent
the wheel continue to use stable, well-developed subroutines for parts of
their code.

2nd, you cannot confuse aesthetic structure
with efficently executing code!!!!  I work in a user services environment
where we help people optimize codes.  Spaghetti code is ugly, but it
executes.  Every subroutine call adds overhead, and we've seen some
gorgeous OOP stuff that runs like molasses in January, dragged down by all
the overhead...  FORTRAN has a decades' long head start in compiler opt.
that's going to be hard to overcome in languages that weren't
originally designed to do math. [Think about it:  FORTRAN = FORmula
TRANslation.  In C, you have to include math.h because arithmetic
operations weren't part of the original concept - writing unix was].

Until these purely PRACTICAL considerations even out, scientists who use
computers as a TOOL will continue to do what works best & easiest. 

Irene Newhouse