Re: Fortran Myths & Disinformation Wanted

[robert_dewar@my-dejanews.com]

In article <36C3BEA7.F96F80FC@ix.netcom.com>,
  essoft@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> It gets worse exponentially -- a few years back I saw a
> rotational dynamics problem OOPed in ADA and in a
> "Fortran style**" ADA  -- thirty pages of code vs page
> and a half, that would've shrunk further had it been in
> Fortran...

Be careful with comparative examples of this kind. They
almost always involve apples and oranges comparisons of
differing styles, and very often involve comparisons of
well written programs with badly written ones, which
prove nothing.

Having used both Fortran and Ada extensively, I would say
that the more powerful abstraction features of Ada are
likely to be significantly valuable in improving the
reliability, readability and maintainability of any large
numerical code, assuming competent programming in both
language domains.

I also think that the fact that Ada has a well thought out
model for floating-point semantics (Fortran has none) can
be of vital importance in numerical codes that are at the
level of carefully worrying about error propagation. It is
impossible to write such code in Fortran in a formally
portable manner.

Examples of snippets, "look at these 5 lines in language X,
how would you do this in language Y" are almost always
bogus. One has to look at large examples, well programmed.

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