eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (09/18/88)
Oops! A very good posting by Doug Pase on computer languages, and (oops!) he cites the ancient Greek God Backus ;-). I off handedly brought the old subject of column major arrays up (remember lexical order versus others reasons). I got this BEFORE Doug's posting arrived. And, no, he doesn't read the Usenet. >Date: Fri, 16 Sep 88 15:06:53 PDT >From: John Backus >To: Eugene miya <eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov> >Message-Id: <880916.150653....> >Subject: Re: Sorry to bother you >In-Reply-To: Your message of Fri, > <8809161958.AA08970@aurora.arc.nasa.gov> > > other work-oriented personal stuff deleted > >The choice of column orientation of matrices in Fortran was based on >the fact that in the 704 (and, I think, generally) the test for reaching >the end of a row did not depend on the row number. Since we expected that >it was far more common to scan row-wise, this choice enabled us to avoid >changing the end-of-row-test at the end of every row. Editing for some privacy. Another gross generalization from --eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@aurora.arc.nasa.gov resident cynic at the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers: "Mailers?! HA!", "If my mail does not reach you, please accept my apology." {uunet,hplabs,ncar,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene "Send mail, avoid follow-ups. If enough, I'll summarize."