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: 103376,9cccf6ef6149fdaa X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Brian Rogoff Subject: Re: Operators -> unit analysis Date: 2000/01/07 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 569723720 References: <38620350.48F8FC08@gecm.com> <850tl9$thu$1@nnrp1.deja.com> <8531v6$6qk$1@nntp3.atl.mindspring.net> <855k4e$8q4$1@nntp6.atl.mindspring.net> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Trace: nntp1.ba.best.com 947281594 229 bpr@206.184.139.136 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-01-07T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: On 7 Jan 2000, Terry Sikes wrote: > In article , > Robert A Duff wrote: > > >>...I'd think that this would be better received if it > >> was tied to the Numerics annex, since certainly this would be the > >> major area of use. > > > >Perhaps, but most numerics code is done in Fortran, and it doesn't > >bother with all this fancy stuff either. > > Which is why so many people are searching for something better, and > why so much numerical code is being translated into C++ (despite its > obvious deficiencies). Yes indeed, I thought that the "well Fortran doesn't do it" excuse sounded quite weak. If you strive to be just as good as Fortran then there is no reason to switch! Tucker Taft's explanation that he feels additional operators compromise readability is the expected Ada response, but I disagree. Certainly overuse of infixes is bad, but I think Ada (or a future Ada-like language) could use either a few more reusable infixes or a more general scheme. Honestly though, while I'm firmly in the "gimme more infixes" camp, I think this is a fairly minor issue. I've also noticed that lots of new numerics (and I include DSP and image processing here) code is written in C or C++. If you really want to see some interesting bleeding edge stuff, check out www.fftw.org, the "Fastest Fourier Transform in the West", which won the Third Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software. While the web page describes it as a C library for computing the DFT, the interesting part is actually the codelet generator which outputs the C, and that is written in OCaml, my other favorite language. -- Brian