Robert G. Brown wrote:
[ language war elided ]
Fortran's I/O commands are terrible. Fortran is miserable if you have
Well, yes ...
to manipulate text. Fortran isn't the easiest thing (consequently) to
Just remember, all text is an array .... I wrote a rough equivalent of
strtok in fortran something like 18 years ago. Needed it to parse
command line arguments. Wasn't terrible, but wasn't super simple.
interface with any sort of GUI or human/interactive code. Here C has a
really significant advantage, although C is still far short of the ease
of managing strings and the like in e.g. perl. A second way I'd LOVE to
change C is to fully integrate regular expressions into the language for
string manipulation so that perl-like constructs such as if(a =~ /^Start/){
do something
}
So you do know about PCRE ... right? http://www.pcre.org/
worked. Yes, you can do it with strcmp or a regexp library and some
effort, but the programming time in perl is vastly lower and the code is
much more readable. C's "parsing" is simply not what it could be,
Yes. Basically what I have been doing for a while, is using Perl as a
front end to parse args, set up environment, and then emit whatever
stuff the computational code needs on the back end to run correctly. It
is a great deal easier to debug than trying to put lipstick on a pig ...
er ... graft reasonable UI stuff onto crusty-old-code.
although it is entirely understandable and one can easily manipulate
data at the byte by byte level to do whatever you like.
This is where IMO Perl (and to a degree Python, though I still have
trouble with the indentation bit ... its so f77) really shine as
front-ends to computational codes.
rgb
Don Shillady
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, VCU
Ashland VA (working at home)> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:26:08 -0800>
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Beowulf]
Teaching Scientific Computation (looking for the perfect text)> CC:
[email protected]> > X-Frumious: Bandersnatch> > On Tue, Nov 20,
2007 at 09:46:41PM +0100, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:> > There is several
ways to look at this issue.> > Suppose your students totally fail as
physics student and even more > > as future manager/teamleader and
continue as computer science students.> > > > Then what language can
they use best?> > ... then they'll be studying many languages, and it
won't be any big> deal that they studied Fortran, Python, and
Mathematica in their first> course.> > It's dumb to act as if these
students are never learning another> language.> > -- greg> >
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