ldl6737@rouge.usl.edu (Lafleur L Dwynn) (05/26/91)
Most of us physicists, mathematicians, and engineers educated in the '60s and '70s cut our programming teeth on mainframe computers using FORTRAN. Many have since moved from mainframes to personal computers and have found that there are other languages much more convenient for the PC platform, especially those which come packaged in a friendly, efficient programming environment (e.g., QuickBASIC or Turbo Pascal). As a result, many have abandoned FORTRAN for the newer languages. However, a large number of these programmers do computation involving expressions with lots of operations on and functions of complex variables, a variable type not allowed in binary operations in such languages as BASIC, Pascal, and C. From what I read, the new object oriented languages like C++ give the programmer use of complex operations with the almost the same ease as in FORTRAN. In fact, I understand the rather popular Turbo C++ includes a library defining essentially all the complex operations and functions appearing in FORTRAN. As someone who is not (yet?) moved from FORTRAN to C++, I am interested in the experiences of computational scientists or engineers out there who (1) started out in FORTRAN, (2) are involved in computation with complex variables, and (3) who have successfully changed to C++. (Direct E-mail response is suggested if you feel this topic is too or limited in scope for the newsgroup.) L. Dwynn Lafleur Professor of Physics University of Southwestern Louisiana lafleur@usl.edu