Fortran vs Python - Newbie Question

[Nomad.C at gmail.com]

On 26 Mar, 17:59, "Erik Johnson" <nob... at invalid.com> wrote:
> <Noma... at gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1174915232.414568.197250 at p15g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
>
> > 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
>
>     So, after reading much of animated debate here, I think few would
> suggest that Python is going to be faster than FORTRAN when it comes to raw
> execution speed. Numeric and SciPy are Python modules that are geared
> towards numerical computing and can give substantial performance gians over
> plain Python.
>
>     A reasonable approach (which has already been hinted at here), is to try
> to have the best of both world by mixing Python and FORTRAN - doing most of
> the logic and support code in Python and writing the raw computing routines
> in FORTRAN. A reasonable approach might be to simply make your application
> work in Python, then use profiling to identify what parts are slowest and
> move those parts into a complied language such as FORTRAN or C if overall
> performance is not fast enough.  Unless your number crunching project is
> truly massive, you may find that Python is a lot faster than you thought and
> may be plenty fast enough on it's own.
>
>     So, there is a tradeoff of resources between development time, execution
> time, readability, understandability, maintainability, etc.
>
>     psyco is a module I haven't seen mentioned here - I don't know a lot
> about it, but have seen substantial increases in performance in what little
> I have used it. My understanding is that it produces multiple versions of
> functions tuned to particular data types, thus gaining some advantage over
> the default, untyped bytecode Python would normally produce. You can think
> of it as a JIT compiler for Python (but that's not quite what it is doing).
> The home page for that module is here:  http://psyco.sourceforge.net/
>
> Hope that help,
> -ej

Ok
Thanks you all for giving a little insight into what Python can
actually do, I think I've read enough to convince me that Python is
generally a very flexible, fast, powerful language that can be used in
a wide variety of applications instead of focusing on numerical
functions like fortran does.
Thanks again!