On 05/02/2013 10:06 PM, Levi Pearson wrote: > This made Fortran the default choice for matrix programming, and so a > lot of research was put into developing good compilers, and for a long > time they soundly trounced C compilers. The C powers that be > eventually got around to defining standard ways to declare that data > would not be aliased, but that's a low-level detail that a C > programmer has got to keep track of and take care not to accidentally > violate if they want to have a program that is both fast and correct. > C compilers have since pretty much caught up to Fortran, at least when > you write programs with the correct annotations, but a scientist who > is not a C language expert who writes the same matrix-based program in > C and Fortran may very well find the Fortran one runs faster.
And it turns out that it's pretty easy to generate fast math algorithms by emitting C code (Blast I think it is called) that can be used in a language like Python to great effect. In fact an awful lot of high-performance computing is done using Python and these fast libraries written (or generated) in C. End result? A superior and faster programming environment that C itself never could fulfill, at least in a timely manner. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
