cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) (07/04/90)
In article <138349@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>, lm@snafu.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy) writes: > In article <1990Jul3.215128.23026@portia.Stanford.EDU> dhinds@portia.Stanford.EDU (David Hinds) writes: > > Geez, is this a cheap shot, or what? FORTRAN has its weaknesses, > >but inefficiency is not one of them. I know of no other language that > >can be as effectively optimized. > > Yeah, I used to like fortran pretty well. I have before me "Programmers Guide > to Fortran 90" which contains things, such as pointers, that make me wonder > if this is going to make fortran an uninteresting language. That a language can be optimized (and I do not think that Fortran has ever been effectively optimized) says nothing about the efficiency of the language. There are important constructs, such as pointers, which have been missing from Fortran from day 1. There are others, such as a list of results of an operation, which have been missing from the commonly used languages completely. I understand that Fortran 90 is eliminating or restricting some of the useful, but not much used, features of Fortran considered bad by language gurus. The use of an ASSIGNED goto, especially without list, can make life difficult for the automatic optimizer, but it can sure speed up a program. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet) {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!cik(UUCP)