 |
 |
>From Karen Goodger on Thursday, 04 Mar 1999... > Our company is currently involved in a modernization project of our > seismic processing system. Most of our code is written in fortran77. > We are currently in a debate as to whether to go with fortran90 or C++. > One of the reasons for considering C++ is the perceived difficulty in > finding programmers who know fortran. Another reason is the maturity of > fortran90 compilers. We have found fortran90 to run our code less > efficiently than fortran77. In either case, we do not intend to rewrite > all of our current fortran77 code in a new language, but would write the > backbone of our processing system in the new language as well as any new > code. Our code is currently Cray dependent, and part of this effort > will be to make the code portable. > > I would appreciate any comments on the above two fears concerning > fortran90. > > Karen >From Clive Page on Monday, 1 Mar 1999... >The problem is that there are, as far as I know, extremely few >attempts to compare OO programming techniques with traditional >ones. A few case studies would be a lot more persuasive than any >amount of hype. Karen's interesting question, and the follow-up responses, were recently brought to my attention and I agree with everyone's input. In addition to the two papers Jack Hatfield mentioned in a previous thread, I would also recommend some of the more recent papers and additional links at the URL he mentioned: http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~szymansk/oof90.html These indicate how we have been able to outperform our existing F77 and C++ codes by using Fortran 90 features in an appropriate way. Some of the documents also give an in-depth comparison of using OO techniques in C++ and Fortran 90 with design and performance comparisons to a traditional Fortran 77 approach. We have generally found that not all OO techniques are useful in scientific programming, but abstraction modeling with good interface designs can give high performance and extensibility for complex serial and parallel applications. ------------------ Dr. Charles D. Norton Phone: 818-393-3920 NASA/JPL MS 168-522 Fax: 818-393-3134 4800 Oak Grove Drive WWW: www-hpc.jpl.nasa.gov/PEP/nortonc Pasadena, CA 91109-8099 Email: [log in to unmask] %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%