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, MSGID_RANDY autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7f5c70275787af8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Robert Dewar Subject: Re: Ada vs Delphi? Date: 1999/08/11 Message-ID: <7os9tp$g2m$1@nnrp1.deja.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 511487623 References: <37ab421a.5414989@news.total.net> <37ab8bd1.0@news.pacifier.com> <37ae1fc8.653954@news.clara.net> <37b1282b.43031685@news.total.net> X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x38.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 205.232.38.14 Organization: Deja.com - Share what you know. Learn what you don't. X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed Aug 11 16:55:27 1999 GMT X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrobert_dewar Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.04 [en] (OS/2; I) Date: 1999-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: In article <37b1282b.43031685@news.total.net>, aratel@total.net (Andre Ratel) wrote: > For my current work, I don't use pointers. I generally tend to > avoid them (but maybe I'm missing something). The only case > where I would use pointers is for sorting. Well of course scientific programming is a VERY broad term, and in fact I would guess that SP covers pretty much the entire range of programming techniques and approaches. What is interesting is that quite a bit of work in SP (I know for example of Olaf Widlund's work in this area) involves the introduction of quite sophisticated data structures, and associated algorithms, for instance complex graph traversal algorithms. Such data structures are naturally and efficiently represented using pointers, instead of having to encode them in arrays. The interesting point here is that what is happening is that advanced techniques from the algorithms area of computer science are migrating into the SP area. Historically, much SP was done by scientists with limited CS training (my own degrees are in chemistry, back from the days when I was doing large scale SP myself in crystalography). Now, with more people trained in CS and algorithms being interested in SP, the fields are much closer together, and it is in the interface that a lot of very interesting work is done (of course I am particularly aware of that due to my association with the Courant Institute :-) Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Share what you know. Learn what you don't.