Re: Numerical Computation and Ada95

[Gary Scott <Gary.L.Scott@lmtas.lmco.com>]

Hi,

Larry Kilgallen wrote:
> 
> In article <3AFAF555.F534480E@lmtas.lmco.com>, Gary Scott <Gary.L.Scott@lmtas.lmco.com> writes:
> > As an F95 programmer, I don't think that for most applications the
> > performance difference between these languages will be significantly
> > different if you limit the code to easily optimizable constructs.
> > However, it is my impression that Fortran compiler vendors have
> > traditionally been much more obsessed with performance issues and I'm
> > certain that the standards committee designs nearly everything
> > obsessively with performance issues in mind (i.e. not "expressivity" of
> > language constructs).
> 
> Whereas I was under the impression that the Fortran standard had recently
> added "pointer" constructs, the bane of optimization everywhere.

Recent as in "pointers" were added a decade or so ago.  I would point
out also, that nearly every compiler supports "Cray" or "integer"
pointers as well which would likely inhibit optimization, however with
the addition of a standard pointer, the need for raw address pointers is
very limited (mixed language mostly, my only use is to use a win32 API
call to allocate a shared memory work space (file mapping) and
subsequently assign the starting address to a procedure variable).  The
next standard will (I think) add a new pointer specific to interfacing
with the C language.