Walt,
Two things come to mind: are we talking efficiency of compilers or efficiency of
programmers?
Another thought, are we comparing the efficiency of some vendors versus others?
I feel that the vectorised code and the new intrinsics give scope for vendors to
"make hay while the sun shines".
An intrinsic like MATMUL should save us many lines of code (maintenance) and allow
the vendor to really optimise this function. A level like LAPACK/ATLAS. Also the
new intrinsics like DOT_PRODUCT and TRANSPOSE should be able to be heavily
optimised by the vendor.
Several of the other features, starting from IMPLICIT NONE are really geared to
increase the programmer's efficiency. Many of the features of this ilk I do not
find increase my efficiency. But then I am "in disagreement" with several of my
betters here and on comp.lang.fortran.
In summary, I believe that the vectoring features have potential to increase the
runtime efficiency of F90 code. Depends on the ability of the vendor. I believe
mine to be good -- F95 on an Alpha VMS system.
Some other features which, by me, could be termed "baggage" should only affect
compile time but not runtime.
I believe that the F95 standard adds baggage to compilers not to runtime. I
suspect that the F2K standard will add even more, but again hopefully not to
runtime for those using Fortran for what it was originally intended for.
For all my bias, I hope that some comments are useful.
Regards, Paddy
Paddy O'Brien,
Transmission Development,
TransGrid,
PO Box A1000, Sydney South,
NSW 2000, Australia
(Street address, 201 Elizabeth Street)
Tel: +61 2 9284-3063
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Either "\'" or "\s" (to escape the apostrophe) seems to work for most people,
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