[comp.lang.fortran] what good is the fortran?

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.