OT: Of C, Fortran and pointer aliasing Was: Python if far from a top performer...

[John J. Lee]

Samuel Walters <swalters_usenet at yahoo.com> writes:

> |Thus Spake Rainer Deyke On the now historical date of Sun, 11 Jan 2004
> 06:46:50 +0000|
[...]
> > The issue with C is that it is too slow for implementing those
> > primitives (in part due to pointer aliasing issues).  Fortran is
> > considerably faster.
> 
> I stand corrected.
> 
> Please help me to understand the situation better.
> 
> I went digging for technical documents, but thus far haven't found many
> useful ones.  It seems everyone but me already understands pointer
> aliasing models, so they might discuss them, but they don't explain them.
[...]

(haven't read all your post, so sorry if I'm telling you stuff you
already know)

Pointer aliasing is just the state of affairs where two pointers refer
to a single region of memory.  Fortran compilers have more information
about aliasing than do C compilers, so can make more assumptions at
compilation time.

Have you tried comp.lang.fortran, comp.lang.c++, comp.lang.c, etc?

http://www.google.com/groups?q=pointer+aliasing+FAQ+group:comp.lang.fortran&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=comp.lang.fortran&selm=1992May27.175805.26097%40newshost.lanl.gov&rnum=3

http://tinyurl.com/2v3v5


John