fouts@lemming.nas.nasa.gov.nas.nasa.gov (Marty Fouts) (09/20/88)
The comment that exponentiation requires mathematical operator syntax, and that Fortran has such syntax but C doesn't is silly. Putting on my mathematician's hat -- my degree was in Math after all -- I would like to point out that *neither* of these languages have decent operator syntax for anything but trivial forms of operators and that from a mathematician's point of view it is silly to think of them as otherwise. Unless of course you are arguing that we should all program in APL or FP because they have appropriate notation. It isn't entirely the fault of the language designers. Early data entry gear had limited character sets. Current gear is better, but not much. Consider that Fortran allows: 1) infix binary arithmatic operators 2) prefix unary arithmatic operators 3) multiple valued "function" references - using alphabetic function names (I pick on Fortran because it has a smaller set of allowed operators than C, and it is easier to enumerate them.) Then consider that the subscript is an operator, as is the integral sign, del, etc. I can't even state a PDE in most computer languages because they don't handle the concept of operator well, and most of the ones I can do it in use some kind of textual representation: partial(u,x,1) + partial(u,x,2) + f(u) = g(u) to represent the Helmholtz equation, for example. Marty +-+-+-+ I don't know who I am, why should you? +-+-+-+ | fouts@lemming.nas.nasa.gov | | ...!ames!orville!fouts | | Never attribute to malice what can be | +-+-+-+ explained by incompetence. +-+-+-+