Subject: re: What languages will be here tomorrow...

From: [email-masked] (Joe M Leonard)
Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 19:38:31 -0400

Alex Turner <[email-masked]) writes:

There seems to be one points that no-one has covered, especially when we
say FORTRAN has run its coarse.  If I am to spend a long time writing a
piece of code to perform a very complex task - I need to be 100% sure
that the code will be in a lagnuage that can be used in the future.  There
is only one language that can really offer that - FORTRAN.

---

Considering the amount of C code written in the last, oh, 5 years
(both commercial and non-commercial), I think C will be with us
for the forseeable future as well.  I suspect in the computational
chemistry arena, there has been (far?) more C code written over this
time than Fortran...

This doesn't mean that there are more lines of C out there in use
than Fortran, merely that times actually have changed a little, or
maybe more than a little.  Having written a fair amount of code in
both languages, I would hate to write anything BUT numerically-
intensive code in Fortran anymore.  Trying to do I/O, or interact
with the environment, etc. seems so much easier in C...

Also, while I cannot say for certain, there seems to be some platforms
for which a Fortran compiler is either unavailable or a relative newcommer.
C, however, seems available wherever one cares to look (although my
experience with supercomputers is not up to date).  While Fortran, on
the strength of some pre-preprocessors, might still hold a lead in
generating "fast" code, sections of "C-tran" seem to optimize as well
if some thought is given to "helping" the compiler.

Something called "Fortran" will be around for a while.  So will something
called "C"...  Neither language is probably the best-choice when
developer effort is the concern, but both seem rather good for heavy
lifting.  It's just that given the annoyances of multi-language software,
there has to be SIGNIFICANT performance issues to get me to mix in
Fortran anymore.

Joe Leonard
[email-masked]

P.S. FWIW, I live in the workstation environment, usually working on
code which is either heavy-lifting or personal/throwaway...