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From: eugene@cs.umb.edu (Eugene O'Neil)
Subject: Re: most popular language?
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Date: Fri, 17 Jan 1997 19:48:55 GMT
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In article <32DF6ED6.41C6@ic.ac.uk>, Gavin Tabor <gavin@ic.ac.uk> wrote:
>>         One the downside of Java for scientist is the most obvious: SPEED.
>> Many calculations take weeks worth of Cray time.  The claim is often
>> made that C is the fastest language.  However, I've seen that Fortran with
>> a good compiler can be just as fast if not faster for some applications,
>> especially with the C++ overhead.  Perhaps JIT will aid this somewhat?
>
>A good/bad programmer will affect the speed in any language. C is
>probably intrinsically faster on workstations, but Fortran compilers
>have had years to be optimised.

Fortran has not only been optimized longer, but is more conducive to 
optimization. Fortran has no pointers and no dynamically allocated memory, which 
limits what the programmer is allowed to do. That is good from the compiler's 
point of view, because it can depend on variables not modifying themselves when 
it isn't looking. A C compiler, on the other hand, cannot depend on that. What 
if some subroutine somewhere calculated a pointer into the middle of your array, 
and modified it? You can't just assume it keeps the values you assign.

The advantage of C over Fortran is flexibility and power, not speed. Fortran is 
fast, but it doesn't take corners as well.  ;-)

-Eugene
