From: Alan Chen Date: 2002-08-23T03:03:02+09:00 Subject: Re: What New Language After Ruby? On Fri, Aug 23, 2002 at 01:10:47AM +0900, Gavin Sinclair wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Dan Sugalski" > > > > Fortran: Yeah, it's older than you are, but it still can't be beat for speed. > > Can I ask why? People say it all the time, but I point-blank refuse to believe > that it is faster than optimised C. They're the same bloody thing, aren't > they? - low-level procedural languages. My knowledge of Fortran is small, but > of course everyone knows it's used for scientific calculations, so it may have > the edge in numerical calculations (infinite precision, ...) but can't you get > a C library that equals it? If not, why not. It's all machine language in the > end, and not sufficiently far from that to begin with for me to believe that > the two should be any different. When you start comparing language speeds, you really need to add some context - which platform, compiler, etc. Fortran for science, math, or engineering applications on supercomputer platforms as well as PC platforms with the right compiler, is typically faster than C given the same developer input time. As far as I've been able to gather, one of the factors in this is that C exposes certain features to the developer that Fortran doesn't - e.g pointers. This allowed the compiler writers to use a class of optimizations which can be more globally applied to programs written in Fortran. It also makes it easier to automatically parallelize (is that a word?) than C. But that's just my conclusions as a non-compiler writer in either Fortran or C. - alan -- Alan Chen Digikata LLC http://digikata.com