Fortran vs. C for numerical work

[John Prentice]

Another interesting point is that in studies done at Cray Research, they
found it took SIGNIFICANTLY longer for their programmers to learn C and the
number of errors generated in coding in C (as opposed to Fortran) was much
higher.  Anyone who has programmed in C should be familiar with that problem.
It is not a particularly straightforward language.  

I would also raise the point that neither Fortran nor C are really all that
great as scientific languages.  They are both old languages which lack alot
of the features one would like in a modern language, particularly in a
world where the future looks increasingly to be in parallelism.  I laughingly
agree that the scientific language of the future will be "called Fortran", but
I don't know that I necessarily believe it.  There is a whole generation
of programmers (and scientists) coming on line who don't particularly 
pledge allegence to Fortran.  Also, the traditional argument for not
ever throwing anything away in Fortran (i.e., there are billions of dollars
worth of old Fortran codes around, which is true I admit) will cease to
be that significant I expect in the future as we move away from serial
machines and as we concede that there is a finite lifetime to codes, even
ones written in Fortran.  This, by the way, is written from the perspective of 
a computational physicist who has authored two hydrodynamic codes, both of
which are on the order of 100,000 lines of code.  

John Prentice
Amparo Corporation
Albuquerque, NM