On Feb 27, 2004, at 4:15 PM, Aleksandar Donev wrote:
> 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.
Not at all. None of that would be lost. Any new language could simply
be built on top of the current fortran backend. Any new language should
basically include Fortran 90's nice array capabilities; they are the
state of the art. Fortran falls down somewhat in other areas in my
view, and it is there that improvements could probably be made.
> 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.
I think this is exactly the problem with attempting to persist with an
existing language, rather than introducing a more modern competitor. In
theory fortran could probably fulfill all of our needs, but it is
constrained by legacy. As long as the legacy elements have to be
supported, the language is susceptible to abuse.
I think the C++-Java comparison is useful here. C++ extends C, and has
inherited many of the more ugly aspects of it. When Sun created Java,
they deliberately avoided making it compatible with C or C++, even
though it is quite similar in many respects. Although this is harder
for developers in the short term, because people have to rewrite some
code, it is better for the software produced in the long run.
> 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...)!
Don't agree here. I'm not for J3 'retiring' fortran either. Keep
fortran going, but let's start developing a more modern scientific
language, which takes the best aspects of fortran, and merges them with
elements of other languages that have worked. Such a language should
also work seamlessly with code written in fortran (and maybe c). Then
let the marketplace decide.
Drew
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