From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2008-04-09T11:34:11+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyâEURO(tm)s not ready - an indepth essay

Diego Virasoro wrote:
>> Now FORTRAN is 50 years old, there's a FORTRAN 95 standard, and the
>> language is still in use (I think -- I haven't written any since 1990).
> 
> Most definitly. In my office we is it constantly. There's only one
> serious contender for number crunching here and it's C, but then C is
> much more of a pain to use, and you need to use the correct flags to
> get the kind of optimisations that Fortran gives you out of the box.

Right around the time I stopped writing Fortran (not by choice -- I got 
laid off) C compilers were just starting to appear that could compete 
with Fortran. The way people wrote C in those days was so infested with 
pointers and mallocs that a lot of code was simply hopeless. Then again, 
people wrote compilers, operating systems, text processors, 
interpreters, etc., in C, and they wrote number crunching in Fortran.

I used to work with the people who developed the second usable C 
compiler for number crunching (the first was developed by a competitor. :)