Hello,
I don't know of a recent benchmark, as the OP requested.
But I think there are two considerations along the lines
of Tim Prince's comments.
Teaching Fortran is much easier than teaching numerical analysis.
That is, if your client wants to hire a programmer for maintenance,
teaching the language is the easy part.
Optimizing C often involves writing inner loops differently
for each processor. Thus, the maintenance costs are actually higher
with C then with Fortran.
HTH
--
Cheers!
Dan Nagle
Purple Sage Computing Solutions, Inc.
On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 07:24:57 -0700, Tim Prince <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>At 06:21 AM 7/13/2004, Naomi Greenberg wrote:
>
>>Could anyone refer me to a fairly current benchmark study comparing C with
>>Fortran in terms of speed for highly computational code? I am trying to
>>justify not converting legacy Fortran code to C code, and my customer is
>>of the opinion that Fortran codes will not be maintainable in the future
>>since engineers are no longer being trained in it. I need actual studies
>>to cite in response to this.
>>Thank you!
>>Naomi Greenberg
>
>This is quite difficult to answer. C is more competitive with Fortran on
>certain platforms than others.
>
>Leaving out the increasing usage of C++, as you must, it shouldn't be
>difficult to make a case that there is as much training and usage of
>Fortran as of C. It takes a great deal of additional work to make C
>competitive with Fortran, where it can be done. Normally, it involves
>non-standard combinations of C and C++, taking advantage of C features
>which may be supported only on certain platforms.
>
>
>
>Tim Prince
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