Fortran vs Python - Newbie Question

[Bruno Desthuilliers]

kyosohma at gmail.com a écrit :
> On Mar 26, 8:20 am, "Noma... at gmail.com" <Noma... at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OK...
>> I've been told that Both Fortran and Python are easy to read, and are
>> quite useful in creating scientific apps for the number crunching, but
>> then Python is a tad slower than Fortran because of its a high level
>> language nature, so what are the advantages of using Python for
>> creating number crunching apps over Fortran??
>> Thanks
>> Chris
> 
> While I have never personally dealt with Fortran, I looked it up here:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran_code_examples
> 
> The code examples speak for themselves. I recommend you look those
> over and then look over similar simple program written in Python.
> Python is still easier to read. Fortran also appears to be a compiled
> language, whereas Python is an interpreted language.

Being 'compiled' or 'interpreted' is not a feature of a language, but of 
a given implementation of a language (and even then, some 
implementations of some languages supports both).

wrt/ CPython (the reference implementation), it is actually compiled to 
byte-code - just like Java. The main difference being that the VM is 
smart enough to automagically (re)compile what's needed.