Coding style article with interesting section on white space

[Andrew McLean]

In article <1gr74p3.1p45u1v182vecgN%aleaxit at yahoo.com>, Alex Martelli 
<aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes
>You're saying that using a different and better compiler cannot speed
>the execution of your Fortran program by 25% when you move it from one
>platform to another...?!  This seems totally absurd to me, and yet I see
>no other way to interpret this assertion about "Fortran programs not
>suffering" -- you're looking at it as a performance _hit_ but of course
>it might just as well be construed as a performance _boost_ depending on
>the direction you're moving your programs.
>
>I think that upon mature consideration you will want to retract this
>assertion, and admit that it IS perfectly possible for the same Fortran
>program on the same hardware to have performance that differs by 25% or
>more depending on how good the optimizers of different compilers happen
>to be for that particular code, and therefore that, whatever point you
>thought you were making here, it's in fact totally worthless.

Look at the Fortran compiler benchmarks here:

http://www.polyhedron.co.uk/compare/win32/f77bench_p4.html

for some concrete evidence to support Alex's point.

You will see that the average performance across different benchmarks of 
different Fortran compilers on the same platform can be as much a factor 
of two. Variation of individual benchmarks as much as a factor of three.

Some of you might be surprised at how many different Fortran compilers 
are available!

-- 
Andrew McLean