I almost agree with you JDL. C++ programmers tend to be 'function orientated' whereas FTN programmers tend to be 'in line' orientated. Perhaps it is often a matter of programming style which makes the most difference. But one must always keep in mind two things: these days many languages are initially, partially compiled down to the same pseudo-language for a latter step, and FOTRAN has been under development by very (and I mean very) experienced people for a very long time and scientific programmers still turn to FORTRAN.
I started this question, but must apologise for not been very active: mainly because my email address has changed, I still have difficulty getting onto the internet (impossible with my SuSE Linux machine), I still cannot link an X Window program, and I am in the middle of moving house from England to Australia. (And must visit family before I depart.) But I have been reading, with interest, all of your comments.
I promise to try a summary ASAP.
Regards, Colin
---- Original message ----
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 17:33:55 +0100 From: John Lamb J.D.Lamb@btinternet.com Subject: Re: [suse-programming-e] Is SuSE 64 bit ? To: suse-programming-e@suse.com
Stefan Hundhammer wrote:
OK, thanks, that's a very informative site.
But according to the charts there, there is hardly any
difference in
performance, right? Sometimes even C/C++ appears to be
faster.
Or am I reading those charts wrong?
No, though there may be other examples where F is actually
faster,
depending on the usual things, how it's compiled, what
number-crunching
is done etc. There are still F libraries such as ATLAS that
are
reputedly better than the C equivalent.
OTOH, since C has the asm keyword, it's always technically
possible to
get C code to compile as fast as F. I've found that wring
the number
crunching stuff in C/C++ carefully often gives assembly
output that I
couldn't reasonably improve, albeit the style of the C/C++
tends to
resemble F a bit.
In the end, there's nothing in C/C++ that says it can't
compile to run
at least as fast as F, esp with the right optimisations (-
march=pentium4
-O3 -mfpmath=sse -msse -msse2 -malign-double works for me!),
though I
think that's not always the point. Otherwise I wouldn't use
java and
python. ;-)
-- JDL
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