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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 5b1e799cdb,3ef3e78eacf6f938 X-Google-Attributes: gid5b1e799cdb,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news1.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!backlog2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.brightview.co.uk!news.brightview.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2009 12:45:21 -0500 From: Jon Harrop Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.functional,comp.lang.c++,comp.programming Followup-To: comp.programming Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:55:20 +0100 References: <2009a75f-63e7-485e-9d9f-955e456578ed@v37g2000prg.googlegroups.com> <7xskgbtcyr.fsf@ruckus.brouhaha.com> Organization: Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. User-Agent: KNode/0.10.9 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7Bit Message-ID: X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-q6FfBTSg0iUx1uginHr1je96svWmYRV5eoMsd2DUfZbQtB76HU9a51sRXZzR361vhEn4QjeORJwd+Wh!8Km9l+cwKj7isEszncYqBxxHfBEVjQlUdCDuCpQ+E98lb4zhvFD4kgraCONeCv+QCUBIUB82D8HN!WCs3ZCxyxZmlN4q6g2o9hmLy X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.39 X-Original-Bytes: 2834 Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.scheme:6291 comp.lang.ada:7531 comp.lang.functional:2602 comp.lang.c++:49017 comp.programming:12283 Date: 2009-08-02T19:55:20+01:00 List-Id: frankenstein wrote: > Fortran by nature is fast even when using object oriented programming. That was true many years ago but Fortran has fallen a long way behind now. Applications like numerical methods from linear algebra operating on matrices with single, double or single/double complex elements were Fortran's last refuge for many years but even they have come under fire now. For example, I recently implemented QR decomposition in F#: http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/ocaml-vs-f-qr-decomposition.html Fortran is not only incapable of expressing the algorithm that generically, it is also up to 3x slower than F#! The reason is the efficiency of parallelism in F#, using the wait-free work-stealing concurrent deques of the Task Parallel Library for the efficient dynamic load balancing of fine-grained parallel work items. If Fortran cannot even compete there, where it is strongest, then it has no hope for other applications. Hence the defacto-standard libraries for things like FFTs have been written in a mix of higher-level languages and C for many years now. For most scientific computing, it is no longer practically feasible to use Fortran because the language is too cumbersome and inexpressive. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?u