ROGER GLOVER <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> [log in to unmask] wrote:

> > Fortran faces extinction threats from C/C++ and Java

> Possibly true.

I agree, although given what I see in this newsgroup, I'll
make book on the extinction of Fortran at 10:1 odds.

> > Fortran exists only on account of people over 40

> I seriously doubt that.

We can settle this quite easily. Does ANYBODY know of an
under-30 programmer who GIVEN A CHOICE would prefer Fortran
over the 'sexier' languages around ??

Which is not to say that the young programmer would be right.
It is the ostrich attitude of the Fortran powers that be that
has brought about this present dire situation.

> > Fortran's real appeal is its cultural continuity with
> > Gauss, Euler etc.

> Oh, come on now. This is just preposterous!

Well - we could start an insult-exchange-marathon over this
but I'll let it slide.

>> We have centuries of mathematical CULTURE (a term that
>> might make the barbarians on this board uncomfortable) that
>> has pretty much 'codified' i,j,k,l,m,n as integer
>> indices of summation.

> In any FORMAL statement of mathematics, *all* variables are
> "explicitly typed." Have you ever seen anything like "Let A
> be a real square matrix of order N, where N is a Natural
> Number."? That is explicit typing. Informal statements of
> math may use common coventions, but formal statements of math,
> the ones that really count, define the meaning of all
> variables used.

If I'm not mistaken, you are a compiler-writer, aren't you ?
That may explain where you're coming from.

In fact you are only re-stating what the ULTIMATE barbarian
Edsger Dykstra and his sycophants have largely succeeded in forcing
down the throats of the programming community (What I found truly
revelatory about Dykstra was his FURIOUS insistence that lists
should begin at 0 instead of 1 !! - I'm sure that has some FORMAL
advantages for the compiler and perhaps even for coding -
but such a barbarian assault on natural HUMAN behavior - ought






to tell us something about the man)

Look at Journals ; someone COULD submit a paper, that is FULLY
INTERNALLY DOCUMENTED, in which Planck's constant is called
'how_I-learnt_to_love_C_and_live_happily_ever_after', Boltzmann's
constant is called 'slashqz' and so forth.

Such a paper would be a barbaric violation of the Culture of Physics.
So it is with programs; The i,j,k,l's being integers and epsilons being
small numbers are all a form of documentation through the culture of
programming that exists outside the program.

>Niklaus Wirth, creator of Pascal, was originally trained as
>an electrical engineer. He became interested in computer
>software and languages through his study of numerical
>analysis, a "mathematical" discipline:
> http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/User/C.J.Plastow/project/wirth.html

 > and its UNSPEAKABLE descendants such as C.

>Dennis Ritchie, creator of C, is a PhD mathematician:
> http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bigbio1st.html

>One might say that these "barbarians" have had a great deal
>of exposure to the "culture" you espouse.

I don't recall that the barbarians Dykstra, Wirth, Ritchie
Kernighan etc. proved a single CREATIVE result in Mathematics.

>Your argument is seriously flawed in other ways as well.
>Coal-fired steam engines carried "safety-critical" passenger
>rail and ship traffic long before diesel and electric engines
>were invented, but that does not mean that they are "safe"
>by today's standards.

good 'Gotcha!'. I should have said that programming languages
based on the Dykstra/Wirth bandwagon haven't proven to be any
safer than good Fortran 77.

>All of these are cases of expert Fortran programmers who
>now write floating-point, computationally-intensive code in
>C++. And why? Because Fortran does not provide them with
>the tools they need to write the kinds of codes they are
>being called upon to write.

I'll bet you a dollar to a donut that Fortran was the better
language to implement the core of all these applications - but

(1) Fortran's 'Jurassic" reputation

(2) Young professionals' career concerns (seen any ads for Fortran
programmers lately )

(3) The fashion police in commercial DP departments who will call
the local lunatic asylum to check on recent escapees if you
suggest Fortran for serious applications.

are the real reasons why all this grist for the Fortran mill went
to C/C++.







I've posted before and was echoed by another poster - surely
the death-knell of fortran has been struck -in that LINEAR
OPTIMIZATION subject to linear constraints - is now done in C/C++
in all the prominent commercial packages for this purpose.

The newsgroup will of course blithely ignore issues of this
nature and discuss ad infinitum how to short-circuit a compound
logical statement if the first logical atom already gives the
answer.

I guess a fast and furious discussion of 'go to's cannot be
far behind.

 >To my way of thinking, elegant expression of computation
 >first became possible in Fortran with Fortran 90 array
 >syntax, derived types, and operator overloading.

You may be right - but you've got to admit, the appearance
of Fortran-90 code is uglier than even 'write only' C-code.
Whats up with underscores and variables that are 775 characters
long ?(I've seen the description 'stilted' applied to F90 in a
reputable computer science textbook.)

How about things like the Cycle statement, Infinite loops,
exit statement ?? I think these have added elegance to Fortran 77
without changing its 'look and feel'.

Its the massive reduction of Fortran's 'tooth to tail ratio'
(code versus declarations) that I think has irrevocably set
fortran on the extinction path. The incipient Balkanization
via F is not going to help either.

> What about the elegant, civilized mathematicians who would
> find it most natural for all three to be complex? Why do
> we discriminate against them?

Can't make an omelet without...


>And what of those refined mathematical souls who would like
>to refer to:
> - the identity matrix "I"
> (after Householder and numerous others)
> - the imaginary unit "i" or "j"
> (I think Euler preferred "i")
> - the mass "m"
> (Newton and Einstein being the obvious examples)
> - the physical constant "k"
> (A favorite of German scholars, Boltzmann being the
> example that comes to mind first)
> - the unit normal vector "i"
> (found in Swokowski's "Calculus, with Analytic Geometry")
>Why must they declare their variables, when the type is
>"obvious" from the context of usage?

I'm sure appropriate additions of I or R in front of a name will
take care of each situation.

We deal with Cars, Dates(time) and Locations in our company a lot.
I use IC,IT,IL for these respectively WITHOUT exception.







DEMAND(IC,IT,IL) = FLOAT(IRES(IC,IT,IL))*(1-RNOSHOW(IC,IT,IL))

is legible, brief, AND FULLY SELF-DOCUMENTING right in the code.
It is these voluntary internal conventions used throughout the code
that allows me to be on call for production support 24 hours/7 days
a week without losing sleep.



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