[Beowulf] Stroustrup regarding multicore

[Bernd Schubert]

On Tuesday 26 August 2008 16:38:11 Michael H. Frese wrote:
> Vincent,
>
> I have always said that C++ is computational science's cold fusion:
> lots of power in, but no net gain.
>
> C is not much better.  I once worked a young computational programmer
> for almost a week to get him to prove to himself that a C source
> program couldn't walk through a 2-d array the hard way as fast as a
> Fortran source program unless the stepping was coded by hand. He
> didn't believe that a 2-d array in C is syntactically a 1-d array of
> pointers to 1-d arrays, and the row pointers must be fetched from

What for this trouble? Using n-d arrays with malloc is by far more difficult 
to handle than a 1-d array with wrapper macros/inline-functions calculating 
the index offset. This way you can also use the fortran array order to be 
perfectly compatible to existing fortran libraries.

> memory!  And separate compilation of functions with variable array
> dimensions?  I hear echoes of Kernighan and Ritchie laughing with
> each other "We don't need no steenking libraries with execution-time
> array dimensioning!  We're system programmers here!  Besides, if
> somebody needs that they'll use Fortran."

Huh? Your function gets a pointer to an array. You can resize this array any 
time. And please don't tell me, you are using static memory.


Bernd