cammerdl@camme.UUCP (R. De Langhe CAMME project) (08/17/90)
Hello world ! On our site, lots of scientists are developping modeling programs to simulate all kinds of hydrodynamical systems like oil-slick evolution, wave-height predictions, etc. The problem for these guys, as for all scientists using computers I guess, is that they are stuck to that little bit of programming languages they know : FORTRAN. Creating code that runs under every input data, produces results, or even results that might be correct, takes several weeks per tiny peace of code. I was thinking that the biggest problem for them is : converting their (often genious) algebra-solutions for a given model, into some programming language like FORTRAN they're not used to 'speak'. Would it not be much more easy and efficient if these scientists could use an algebra-like programming language, in which they can easily recognize errors, or proof correctness of an algorithm, etc. and let some kind of a source-code generator parse their expressions into C (or FORTRAN) ? The resulting program would even be quite efficient, because the problems they study involve often many thousands of matrix-elements to compute (on a supercomputer). Therefore I'd like to ask for opinions about this problem, and if someone has developped or has under development such algebra-syntax parser/code generator. The machines we are working which all run under UNIX bsd 4.2 and have (vectorising) C and FORTRAN compilers. Please email your opinions and suggestions to me. Thanks ! Rob