the python name

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2019-01-04 22:59:40 -0500, Avi Gross wrote:
> I don't go back to the beginning of FORTRAN. My comment was not that FORTRAN
> was badly named when it was among the first to do such things. I am saying
> that in retrospect, almost any language can do a basic subset of arithmetic
> operations.

So this is something that Fortran did right. In hindsight we might be
tempted to say that this was obvious and no great achievement, but I'm
not sure it felt that way at the time. There were certainly other
languages like Lisp (1958, a bit after Fortran) and Forth (1970 - quite
a bit later) whose inventors thought that the way mathematicians write
expressions isn't the best way to program computers. 

But as you say almost all programming languages still in wide use today
do it like Fortran (whether they copied it from Fortran or invented it
independently), so it is now the "natural" way to do it.


> And there is nothing in principle that necessarily stops any
> modern language code from being optimized by translators to be even more
> rapid than the original versions of FORTRAN.

I'm sure many current languages are much faster than the *original*
versions of FORTRAN. Those were among the very first compilers and
people hadn't figured out how to generate efficient code yet.

*Modern* Fortran compilers however are quite good and continue to get
better.

> If anything, I can well imagine algorithms using parallel
> architectures from performing some operations way faster.

One advantage of Fortran over C is indeed that it is easier to exploit
parallelism in Fortran programs than in C programs.

If you implement the same algorithm in naive Fortran and naive C, the
Fortan compiler might figure out that the algorithm can be parallelized
while the C compiler can't be sure. (Both languages have constructs
(some native, some as extensions) to specify that explicitely, but the
programmer has to use them (and use them correctly))

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | we build much bigger, better disasters now
|_|_) |                    | because we have much more sophisticated
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         | management tools.
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ | -- Ross Anderson <https://www.edge.org/>
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