C vs. FORTRAN

[Jim Giles]

>From article <14523 at bfmny0.UUCP>, by tneff at bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff):
> [...]                            Software that works right, and early,
> is more important that a shaved MIP.  [...]

In that case, Fortran is certainly a better choice than C for most
numerical computations.  Fortunately, it also helps if you're after
shaving a few MIPs as well.

The best test for a programming language is that simple concepts should
be simple to represent.  For numerical computations, Fortran does this
better than C.  Consider, for example, a routine to do matrix multiply
on arbitrary sized and shaped matrices - both C an Fortran require the
programmer to express the iteration explicitly, but only C requires the
index calculations to be done explicitly.  C++ does better, but only
if the programmer has implemented a class for matrices and the definitions
of the operations.  Still, it's a step in the right direction - when will
we see a Fortran++ ?