From: "James Giles" Subject: Re: Fortran Myths & Disinformation Wanted Date: 1999/02/05 Message-ID: <79fuih$989@bgtnsc03.worldnet.att.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 441172569 References: <36B9B8FF.4E34BF22@mixcom.com> <36BA1282.41EA5CB3@earthlink.net> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 Organization: AT&T WorldNet Services Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Jos Bergervoet wrote in message ... ... >It may be at the expense of truth, but Craig was explicitely asking >for myths and disinformation. Nothing was said about them being true! > >Today of course, nobody really believes these myths any longer. But by >collecting them one can become famous, like Homer, or the Grimm brothers. Well, this very thread is actually a branch of a discussion which began in December with an article titled "Why Fortran" which I quote below. Obviously some people do still believe these "myths". >> There is this question that I often ask around but that until now I >> haven't received a satisfactory answer to. >> >> My question is: why use Fortran? I had to learn Fortran 77 recently to >> develop numerical analysis programs. Most of the time I spent on my >> programs was dedicated to getting around some constraints of Fortran: >> arrays whose index start at 1, only 1 type of loop, the necessity of GOTO >> statements, etc etc. The standard argument I get as to why mathematicians >> use Fortran is speed and efficiency; it seems to me that C or one of its >> derivatives, even Pascal, would do the job as efficiently and much more >> clearly. With all these restrictions in variable names, and all these >> inconvenient branching statements, a Fortran program must be next to >> impossible to industrially debug/maintain/update 10 years after it was >> written. I am puzzled as to why Fortran is still so widely used. Is it >> because some of the early applications were written in Fortran and now it >> is too much of a hassle to convert them, and thus the work keeps being >> done in this language? Or is there some other point that I am totally >> missing? -- J. Giles