[Beowulf] Teaching Scientific Computation (looking for the perfect text)

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:

> You haven't tried anything F90 or above. Take a look at some tutorials.
> It's basically the same as in C now. You have allocation, pointers
> (if you want them).

And if we can just get C to add binary exponentiation, and fortran to
add {} support for loop delimiters, and.... we can actually meet in the
middle with agreement on a common syntax and subroutine call methodology
(so we can find all those call variables on the stack and so on) and
call the result Fortran Unified with C, Kerpow! which would immediately
start to be called by the obvious acronym and the war would be over.
Make love, so to speak, not war... Groovy!

>> easier to write and understand code like a*b**i or a*b^i rather than
>> a*pow(b,i).
>
> In Fortran it's always been x**y. The good compilers let x and y be any
> data types (I've not tried using a complex as the exponent though).

Ya, but you see I'd like to unify in LaTeX as well.  After all, why
shouldn't a compiler understand:

  a(i) = \sum_{i=0}^{100} f(i,x(i),y(i))*e^{-\omega t}

???  So I want it to be able to grok b^i.

Then when I'm done writing a program I can pop it intact into a latex
shell and bang, there it is, perfectly printed...

It will make the unified acronym even better as well, if we add
"&La"...;-)

   rgb

(Who is about half serious.  If we really wanted formula translation
compilers, we could write them, and if we used Latex as a base we'd be
about halfway there as it already has the fairly rigorous rules required
to correctly parse the objects.  The compiler goal would be simple.
Make the computer do exactly what the typeset equations that result
from the Latex tell it to.)

>
> Jeff
>

-- 
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443
Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb
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