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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Interfaces.Ada
Date: 3 Nov 1994 06:18:59 -0500
Organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
Message-ID: <39agv3$870@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu>
References: <39602v$3rl@felix.seas.gwu.edu> <396agd$9bt@network.ucsd.edu>
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Date: 1994-11-03T06:18:59-05:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

It is actually the columnwise choice in Fortran that is peculiar. In most
languages it doesn't matter how arrays are stored (you can't normally
tell), and rowwise is somewhat the more natural choice for ENglish speakers
(note how you are reading rows of this message and not columns).

Why Fortran chose column-wise I don't know, but the choice of using
row-wise is well established (all Algol compilers I know of used row
wise), and basically we just have another one of those incompatiilities
which is a nuisance.

At this stage, obviously you can't be compatible with everyone automatically,
but the pragma Convention (Fortran seems a nice approach in Ada 9X (it was
actually my idea to put it in in this general form, so I'm of course biased
in liking the way this is done :-)