On Mar 26, 9:06 am, stef <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > As said by others, "Portability, scalability & RAD" as an advantage of > Python are probably far more important.
All of those claimed advantages can be debated, although they may exist for some tasks. (1) Portability. Fortran has been run on hundreds if not thousands of platforms since 1957. People who value portability often want assurance that their code will be supported by compilers/interpreters produced in the future. Standard-conforming Fortran 95 code is conforming Fortran 2003 code, and the standards committee has decided not to remove features in future versions. Python 3 is still somewhat up in the air, and it will NOT be backward compatible with Python 2.x, although migration tools will be provided. (2) Scalability. If talking about parallel computing, the widely used OpenMP Application Program Interface (API) supports multi-platform shared-memory parallel programming only in C/C++ and Fortran. In general, high performance computing is done in C, C++, and Fortran. (3) RAD. Scripting programs WILL be faster to write in Python, because of duck typing, the many built-in data structures, and other features. For larger programs, a Fortran (or C++ or Java) compiler will catch some errors at compile time that are caught only at run time in Python, perhaps after considerable time has elapsed. Furthermore, the higher speed of Fortran may mean that the time between program runs is 1 minute vs. 10 minutes in the corresponding Python program. This can speed the development cycle. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list