Python is far from a top performer according to benchmark test...

[Lothar Scholz]

Samuel Walters <swalters_usenet at yahoo.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.01.11.06.08.18.867825 at yahoo.com>...

> I know very little about numeric processing, and even less about Fortran.
> It's true that my background is in mathematics, but in *pure* mathematics
> where pointer-based languages tend to be helpful, not hurtful.  

Okay seems that you don't know a lot about compiler writing.

A C compiler only knows a little bit about the context so it must
always assume that a data inside a member can be referenced from
another place via an alias pointer.

Fortran does not have this problem so a lot of optimizations can be
done and values can be hold in registers for a much longer time,
resulting in much greater speed.

Remember that on supercomputers a 25% spped enhancement (which a good
fortran compiler is faster then C) can mean a few million dollars of
saved hardware costs. The coding time is not importing compared to the
running time. So real hard numerics are always done in Fortran.

GNU Fortran is a stupid project because it translates the Fortran code
to C.


Python for hardcore numerics, even with PyNumerics, is simply a very
bad solution.