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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,42b96374c851ce5a X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: mgk25@cl.cam.ac.uk (Markus Kuhn) Subject: Re: Ada for numerics computation (i.e. forget Fortran ?) Date: 1999/04/23 Message-ID: <7fqeua$ih8$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 470075817 References: <372083A1.45A5EB97@t-online.de> Organization: U of Cambridge Computer Lab, UK Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1999-04-23T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <372083A1.45A5EB97@t-online.de>, HNBeck@t-online.de (Hans N. Beck) writes: |> does anyone has experiences with Ada and numerical |> applications ? Have you seen http://amok.ast.univie.ac.at/~stift/stift_home.html which is a web page that propagates the use of Ada95 in astrophysics number crunching. |> Does Ada fit for this? It think it does! You have all the types available (including complex), you have a better exception handling than in Fortran, and with tasks, you have a powerful construct for using parallel processors. Ada is certainly much better suited than C, which thanks to the array/pointer duality prevents many of the strong optimizations that number-crunching applications need on modern RISK architectures. C implicitely assumes that arrays have to be stored always in RAM (as opposed to registers), while compilers can handle non-aliased Ada arrays much more flexible. (I actually wonder, whether GNAT 3.11p does produce more efficient code for non-aliased arrays than the corresponding C code, or whether GNAT limits itself to the optimization capabilities of gcc.) |> It's not only a question of types available, but also |> of efficiency (speed) of the compilers. You get Ada compilers today that are quite comparable in efficiency with C compilers. On more exotic architectures such as super computers, you might not find the same level of optimization yet as it is available for Fortran 77 compilers. It depends a lot on the architecture. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: