ken@turtlevax.UUCP (Ken Turkowski) (01/07/85)
In article <251@harvard.ARPA> breuel@harvard.ARPA (Thomas M. Breuel) writes: >BTW, who wants to displace FORTRAN from its dominating position in >numerical computing? And why would you want to replace it with 'C'? >'C' is not very suited to numerical applications anyhow; the automatic >promotion of float to double, and the lack of handling >of over- and underflow are some of the problems. (Flames to me -- I >love flames. Don't clutter the net with them). <Disregarding flame warning> Numerical algorithms in C are much easier to maintain, as well as more transportable. 'C' is a language, not an implementation. The automatic promotion of float to double, as well as chars and shorts to longs on machines whose int is long, are both performance bugs that I suspect will be fixed by someone in the near future. The handling (i.e. interrupts) of overflow and underflow is an operating system problem, and has nothing to do with the C language. It should be able to be solved with a subroutine call. -- Ken Turkowski @ CADLINC, Menlo Park, CA UUCP: {amd,decwrl,nsc,spar}!turtlevax!ken ARPA: turtlevax!ken@DECWRL.ARPA