[Beowulf] Fortran is Awesome

[Peter St. John]

Well Fortran, C, and even (I assume!) Cobol, are all Turning Complete, so
you can do anything any of those languages can do, in any other of them.
But some languages are a more facile vernacular for a problem domain. If I
wrote C to do the abstract algebra that Cayley does I'd be reinventing many
wheels. It's true that emacs would be better for some things than vi, but I
always use the latter because I know it; but it's worth learning any
scripting language to do scripting when compiling would be nuts.

Peter

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 10:22 AM Stu Midgley <sdm900 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>> But yeah, C can do anything Fortran can do, and then some.  People do
>> not write operating systems in Fortran for a reason.
>
>
> I've written a fortran-like scripting language (and the bones of a basic
> compiler) in Fortran...  everything you can do in C you can do in Fortran.
>
> People often use the lack of pointers as a reason to NOT use Fortran,
> which is rubbish.  Just allocate the whole address space and go to town
> with your own pointers.  Which... if you really think about it is all that
> C does.  In theory the concept of a SIGSEG is only an OS limitation on C.
> You "can" in theory just allocate any address you want without allocation
> and pre-allocation.
>
> --
> Dr Stuart Midgley
> sdm900 at gmail.com
>
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