ajayshah@alhena.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) (04/03/91)
Fortran:
- great base of library code around
- your boss/advisor probably uses it
- you don't want to touch it.
Pascal:
- Standard pascal is crippled.
- Turbo Pascal is fantastic, but locks you into the PC,
- strong strong typing cripples scientific libraries (OOP has
solutions, but that locks you into the PC even more).
- you don't want to use the PC!
C:
- Better than Fortran as a language,
- decent libraries available, especially with f2c around,
- terrible syntactic&semantic irritations like clumsy matrices.
CS types may claim C's pointers are elegant, but to a
mathematician they're a pain in the butt.
- great portability, the best available today.
- excellent hooks into Unix internals; standard C library is
wonderful -- so everytime you need to do something
non-number-crunching you are well off.
C++:
- Gorgeous code quality enabled by operator and function
overloading
- Usual C strengths on portability-Unix integration, availability
of old fortran libraries via f2c.
Modula, APL, lisp etc:
- Way too flaky for serious consideration.
- I love what I've read about Modula but I don't want to
touch something so far from being a standard.
In all, I'm moving to C++ for my numerical work.
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Ajay Shah, (213)734-3930, ajayshah@usc.edu
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
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