"Vectorizing C compiler for the Cray" (Call-by-reference)

Bill Stewart wcs at ho95b.UUCP
Wed Apr 24 11:50:20 AEST 1985


I suspect that the motivation for a call-by-address C is to have
something more useful than FORTRAN-66, but that won't confuse fortran
programmers.  A couple of solutions, more reasonable than 
		brain-damaging C -

- Fortran-77	The language assumes call-by-reference, and could
		easily enough tolerate having recursion added (as UNIX
		f77 does.)  If all you really want are control
		structures and recursion, this is a good place to start,
		and it will keep old programs working.  I suppose yu
		could also add pointers - the resulting language would
		resemble fortran more than call-by-ref resembles C.

- PL/I		Well, some reasonable-sized subset of PL/I.  The
		language has pointers, of sorts.  There are lots of
		six-foot-thick manuals for the language, and it
		has a few features useful for scientific programming
		that C doesn't have, specifically arrays with variable
		dimensions (you can declare A(N,N), where N is a
		parameter passed to a subroutine).

- APL		an inherently vector-oriented language should be easy
		to adapt to a vector-processor, and you it's a nice
		language for expressing mathematics, and for debugging
		on your "slow" computer before you turn it loose on the
		real data.
				Bill Stewart



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list