jon@hanauma.Stanford.EDU (Jon Claerbout) (07/31/90)
I use ratfor (rational fortran) and C equally often for 10 years. I'm writing a textbook that exhibits about 40 subroutines that illustrate engineering concepts for imaging. The subroutines make about 120 figures. I chose to show the subroutines in _RATFOR_ because: 1. Ratfor looks more like mathematics than C 2. The do-loop in C is obtuse and unnecessarily verbose. 3. Matrices in C don't look like matrices in mathematics 4. Ratfor can be easily converted to C, but not vice versa. To make fortran bearable, I wrote a preprocessor to allow memory allocation statements: temporary real x(n1,n2) which I did with awk and UNIX system calls. Maybe someday C++ will be a suitable alternative, but meanwhile it still has the clumsy do-loop's.