From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,c4cb2c432feebd9d X-Google-Thread: 1094ba,c4cb2c432feebd9d X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,gid1094ba,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "John" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Ada vs Fortran for scientific applications Date: 23 May 2006 16:01:07 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <1148425267.372671.322270@g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.172.156.245 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" X-Trace: posting.google.com 1148425273 23585 127.0.0.1 (23 May 2006 23:01:13 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 23 May 2006 23:01:13 +0000 (UTC) In-Reply-To: User-Agent: G2/0.2 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050915 Firefox/1.0.7,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: g10g2000cwb.googlegroups.com; posting-host=67.172.156.245; posting-account=SN40OAwAAABM_rISntbjsmd9hGuJXrzP Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:4395 comp.lang.fortran:10156 Date: 2006-05-23T16:01:07-07:00 List-Id: Nasser Abbasi wrote: > I like to discuss the technical reasons why Ada is not used as much as > Fortran for scientific and number crunching type applications? > I have some historical observations to add to the discussion. I can tell about how Ada was discussed as a candidate for number crunching in one very large application domain. Quite a few (20?) years ago there was a conference in Albuquerque to describe Ada's potential in the Department of Energy national labs. Then as now the labs use large number crunching computers to compute complex physics models. There were a couple of mostly unbiased papers circulated and discussed that compared languages. I presented some numerical modelling work in Ada that I was doing at LLNL. As I recall Ada was praised on technical and management criteria and scarcely a discouraging word was heard. But I think that might have been the high water mark of Ada's visibility to that community, where intensely numeric computation takes place. My sense is that the outcome (that Fortran is the principle language for scientific modelling) comes from sound engineering judgement. "If it ain't broke, don't replace it." If there are gains that Ada might bring (and I believe there probably are), the difficulty and uncertainty of a changeover overwhelm the benefits. Ada did continue to make substantial contributions to several LLNL programs, however not in the numerical computation domain. John Woodruff retired software engineer