[Beowulf] [EXTERNAL] Re: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: Spark, Julia, OpenMPI etc. - all in one place

[Lux, Jim (US 7140)]

On 10/19/20, 8:15 AM, "Beowulf on behalf of Douglas Eadline" <beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org on behalf of deadline at eadline.org> wrote:

    --snip--

    >> Well, some of it surely comes from the fact that some of us (even older
    >> ;)
    > never wanted to touch Fortran with a 10-foot pole, so having a "modern"
    > fortran means nothing.


    I am curious why? It was designed for "FORmula TRANslation"


I, too, am curious. Aside from it being the first real compiled language, and that I learned it as a child. Old style Fortran certainly isn't going to win awards for making complex data structures like linked lists and trees (Although it can and has been done - in the immortal words of Arne Saknussemm: quod feci) - I think that someone who has a computing problem that needs that sort of data structure is going to pick another language. 

But for raw numerical crunching, it's pretty good - although I confess that most of those algorithms are simple enough that ANY language is pretty easy to use.  Fortran does have a native COMPLEX type, which is exceedingly handy. Sure, you can make structs with .r,.i and implement all the overloadings for operators in other languages, and I'm sure someone has, but hey, when it's just out of the box, it's easier.