Drew McCormack wrote:
> There are lots of new languages, but non of
> them have really taken serious aim at scientific number crunching. I
> would welcome a challenger. Competition is healthy.
Many and many years of development have gone into Fortran compilers.
Developing all the optimizations just for, for example, array operations,
takes time and effort. Any competition would need a long time to catch up. A
much better alternative is for users to actually express real interest in
pure dialects of Fortran such as F. It will be relatively easy for vendors to
restrict their front ends to F-like syntax. But this has not
happened---people seem to want to mix their legacy codes with new stuff, so
every compiler must carry all the baggage around. It is not something J3 or
anyone else can change, but exactly those who are writing petitions to do the
wrong thing (i.e. retire a beatufil and well-developed language to develop
something new---years will be lost and scientific computing will lag even
further behind then it already does...)!
Best,
Aleks
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