1 Dec
2010
1 Dec
'10
4:19 p.m.
On 1 Dec 2010 at 16:45, Richard wrote:
One interesting thing about FORTRAN that keeps it
alive is that due to
the semantics of FORTRAN compared to C, its easier to optimize the
execution of FORTRAN statements.
Indeed. Back in the 80's, we got some very good compiler people
together to write an optimizing vectorizing FORTRAN compiler, using a
lot of very aggressive methods.
Since we'd done all of the heavy lifting, we thought that it would be
a good idea to take the same back end and write a C front end for it.
Easy money, right?
After much hair-pulling, we came to the conclusion that pointer
variables are evil; pointers to pointers are extremely evil and C
programmers use entirely too much of both.
--Chuck