Re: Fortran vs C++ vs. etc (has little to do with realtime anymore)

["Joseph M. O'Leary" <NOSPAMjmoleary@earthlink.net>]

Jeffrey Templon <templon@studbolt.physast.uga.edu> wrote in article
<m34t7q3bcc.fsf_-_@studbolt.physast.uga.edu>...
> One of the main reasons I tend to push Fortran (or something similar,
> like Ada or Python ... although maybe not everyone would see what
> I mean by "similar" here ;-) is that with stuff like C++, you *do*
> have to know what you are doing, or you will make a mess of it.
> The fact remains (and will for some time) that many scientific
programmers
> are scientists FIRST and programmers SECOND.  Turning the average
> physicist/programmer (at least in my field) loose with a C++ compiler
> is like giving your car keys to your eight-year-old.  A few of
> them would actually be able to drive, but most of them would cause
> big damage trying.
> 
> So one of my reasons for Fortran still being around: you can write
> a reasonable program which runs reasonably efficiently just by more
> or less typing in an expression of a simple algorithm.  Fortran's "mental
> model" of the computer is very simple.

I agree with you. I spent the first 4 years of my professional career
working a large scale VAX/VMS Over-the-Horizon Radar project that was
written almost totally in FORTRAN.  When I say large scale, I'm talking
about something that required 2 VAX 6000/430 mainframes and, employed about
70 or 80 concurrent processes

Then I spent about a year and a half working on a Visual C++/Windows NT
project that replaced a large portion of the older project -- mainly the UI
code.   The difference between the 2 software development styles was like
night and day.  In the old system, you had to know beforehand exactly how
much memory your app (or process) required.  It was all allocated when the
process started.  If you data outgrew that size, the process crashed. 

Also, since it was in FORTRAN, the code read like...well like BASIC.  It
was very easy to pick up and very straightforward.  All code paths were
very structured, hierarchical, and BIG.  (Huge).  I think we documented
very well what we did and wrote some very clean code.  We didn't try to
force old, procedural programming techniquest on to an object-oriented
langauge.  We accomplished the same task with probably less than one-third
as many lines of code as the FORTRAN.

Still, I don't envy the long-time FORTRAN programmer who has to switch from
maintaining the old code base to maintaining the new one, even if it is
much less code to look at.  It requires quite a philosophical shift.  

Joe O'