On 26 Mar, 14:20, "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> what are the advantages of using Python for > creating number crunching apps over Fortran?? If you have to ask, you've not experienced enough Fortran to know its sheer horror. You can write programs in Python that do usefully complicated things, and you can get them to work in a reasonable time. Fortran can't do this, for anything more than the trivial. "Classic" Fortran tasks of the past are now seen as trivial. OK, so they did it to a lot of data, but they really didn't do anything very complex to it. You can also write Python that other people can read and maintain. You can't do this in Fortran, without a truly insane amount of trouble. As Fortran programs have historically been authored and hacked on by successive generations of grad students, this is the most vital feature of all. Finally we're no longer so interested in "number crunching". Number crunching used to consist of simple operations over vast arrays of data, although this was data with remarkably simple structure by today's standards. These just aren't the major class of problems of interest today. There's a massive difference between old-school FEA (bashing Newton and Hooke into tinier and tinier cells) and bioinformatics or anything involving the representation of big data graphs. > Python is a tad slower than Fortran If the Fortran program turns out to have been broken all along, then who cares? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list