Re: Recent CACM "viewpoint" article

[jcallen@Encore.COM (Jerry Callen)]

In article <1990Apr11.190324.27161@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> hirchert@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert) writes:
>In fairness to Bailey, I would note
>
>o Saying that some people have found the results of automatic translation
>  to be acceptable is quite different from saying the automatic translation
>  of Fortran programs is good enough to impose on the entire Fortran
>  community.

I'll say, and I'm not even a "Fortran person." See below.

> [stuff deleted]
>
>o Automatically translated programs won't necessarily produce an acceptable
>  level of performance.  (Fortran's inbuilt restictions to allow high
>  performance are hard to mimic in a language which doesn't have them.

I recently worked on an Ada
"benchmark" that was obviously a Fortran program that had been machine
translated to Ada. Fortran statement numbers were changed to labels that
looked like <<L005>>, looping constructs were converted to if tests and
gotos and in general the code was real garbage. The labels and gotos will
cause any reasonable optimizer to have fits and give up. Unless an automatic
translation system can do a MUCH better job, it's useless. I can't IMAGINE
trying to maintain this sort of crap.

>I'm not saying you shouldn't respond to Bailey's comments, but try to avoid
>looking like language bigots or reactionaries.

I don't have a strong opinion regarding Fortran 8X (or 90, or whatever it
ends up being called). I do have a good friend who's been very heavily
involved with X3J3 and he has expressed occasional disgust with the whole
process; it IS at least somewhat political, and even he isn't completely
convinced that updating Fortran is a great idea. Geez, can't ANY programming
language be allowed to die in its sleep of old age? :-)

In any case, I can't think of any good reason to translate perfectly 
functional code to Ada or Modula or Algol 68 (Algol 68?!? Get real...);
leave it in Fortran, and use pragma interface if you need to access
it from Ada. It certainly makes sense to use a more recent language for
NEW code, though, IF a compiler with suitable performance is available.

>Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
>National Center for Supercomputing Applications

-- Jerry Callen
   jcallen@encore.com

   Speaking from, but certainly not for, Encore Computer Corporation.