1-2  COMPARISON OF FORTRAN AND C 
 ********************************
 (Thanks to Craig Burley for the excellent comments)

 The world of computing sometimes adopts silly fashions, too often 
 good companies and products fell from grace, and lesser ones gain
 the upper hand.  Some new examples for the uselessness of quality 
 are the MS empire and Compaq buying Digital Equipment Corporation.

 It seems that the fashion winds (in the US, in the UK it seems to
 be different) blows now in the numerical computing world towards 
 C and C++.  This strange trend is probably driven by people who 
 are not experienced numerical programmers.  

 See the article by Dr. John Prentice:
    
      Fortran 90 as a language of choice for science students 

 and the one by Jerrold Wagener:
   
      Fortran 90 and Computational Science 

 Fortran still predominates in the numerical computing area, but 
 it seems to lose ground, the following points may help you make 
 up your mind. 


 (Partly adapted from the Fortran FAQ)

 a) FORTRAN tends to meet some of the needs of scientists better.  
    Most notably, it has built in support for:

     o  Variable-dimension array arguments in subroutines, this 
        feature makes it possible to write general purpose routines 
        without explicitly specifying array dimensions passed to them. 
        Standard C lacks this important feature (some compilers like 
        gcc have it as non-standard extension) and the workarounds 
        are very cumbersome. 

        This feature by itself is sufficient to prefer Fortran over
        C in numerical computing.

     o  A rich set of useful generic-precision intrinsic functions. 
        Such functions can be highly optimized (written in assembly 
        language with optimized cache utilization), and they make 
        programs standard at a higher level (and more portable). 

     o  Builtin complex arithmetic (arithmetic involving complex 
        numbers represented as having real and imaginary components).

     o  Array index-ranges may start and end at an arbitrary integer,
        the C convention of [0,N-1] is usually inconvenient.

     o  Better I/O routines, e.g. the implied do facility gives 
        flexibility that C's standard library can't match. 
        The Fortran compiler directly handles the more complex 
        syntax involved, and as such syntax can't be easily reduced 
        to argument passing form, C can't implement it efficiently.

     o   A compiler-supported infix exponentiation operator which is 
        generic with respect to both precision and type, AND which 
        is generally handled very efficiently, including the commonly 
        occurring special case  floating-point**small-integer.

     o  Fortran 90 supports an array notation that allows operations 
        on array sections, and using vector indices.  

        The new intrinsic functions allow very sophisticated array 
        manipulations. 

        The new array features are suitable for parallel processing.

     o  Fortran 90 supports automatic selection of numeric data types 
        having a specified precision and range, and makes Fortran 
        programs even more portable.

     o  Fortran extensions for parallel programming are standardized 
        by the High Performance Fortran (HPF) consortium.

    Fortran 90 supports useful features of C (column independent code,
    pointers, dynamic memory allocation, etc) and C++ (operator 
    overloading, primitive objects). 

 b) The design of FORTRAN allows maximal speed of execution: 

     o  FORTRAN 77 lacks explicit pointers, which is one reason that 
        it is more amenable to automatic code optimization. 
        This is very important for high-performance computing. 

        Fortran 90 allows explicit pointers restricted to point
        only to variables declared with the "target" attribute,
        thus facilitating automatic optimizations.

     o  Fortran was designed to permit static storage allocation,
        saving the time spent on creating and destroying activation 
        records on the stack every procedure call/return. 

        Recursive procedures are impossible with static allocation, 
        but can be simulated efficiently when needed (very rare). 

     o  Fortran implementations may pass all variables by reference,
        the fastest method.

     o  Fortran disallows aliasing of arguments in procedure-call 
        statements (CALL statements and FUNCTION references), all
        passed argument lists must have distinct entries.

        Fortran disallows also aliasing between COMMON (global) 
        variables and dummy arguments. 

        These restrictions allows better compiler optimizations.

 c) There is a vast body of existing FORTRAN code (much of which is 
    publicly available and of high quality). Numerical codes are 
    particularly difficult to port, scientific establishments usually 
    do not have large otherwise idle programming staffs, etc.  
    so massive recoding into any new language is typically resisted 
    quite strongly.

 d) FORTRAN 77 tends to be easier for non-experts to learn than C, 
    because its 'mental model of the computer' is much simpler.  

    For example, in FORTRAN 77 the programmer can generally avoid 
    learning about pointers and memory addresses, while these are 
    essential in C.  More generally, in FORTRAN 77 the difference 
    between (C notation) x, &x, and often even *x is basically 
    hidden, while in C it's exposed.  Consequently, FORTRAN 77 is 
    a much simpler language for people who are not experts at 
    computer internals.

    Because of this relative simplicity, for simple programming
    tasks which fall within its domain, (say writing a simple
    least-squares fitting routine), FORTRAN 77 generally requires
    much less computer science knowledge of the programmer than
    C does, and is thus much easier to use.

    Fortran 90 changes the picture somewhat, the new language is
    very rich and complex, but you don't have to use or even know
    about all this complexity.

 e) The C standard requires only a basic double-precision mathematical 
    library, and this is often what you get. The FORTRAN standard, on the 
    other hand, requires single & double precision math, many vendors add 
    quad-precision (long double, REAL*16) and provide serious math support.

    Single-precision calculations may be faster than double-precision 
    calculation even on machines where the individual machine instructions 
    takes about the same time because single-precision data is smaller 
    and so there are less 'memory cache misses'.

    Quad-precision (long double) calculations are sometimes necessary to 
    minimize roundoff errors.

    If you have only double-precision mathematical routines, the basic 
    mathematical primitives will take up unnecessary CPU time when used
    in single-precision calculations and will be inexact if used with 
    'long double'.

 f) FORTRAN is designed to make numerical computation easy, robust 
    and well-defined:

       1) The order of evaluation of arithmetical expressions
          is defined precisely, and can be controlled with 
          parentheses.

       2) The implicit type declaration feature saves time/typing
          (however it makes your program vulnerable to annoying
          and hard to detect bugs).

       3) Case insensitivity eliminates bugs due to 'miscased'
          identifiers.

       4) The lack of reserved words in the language gives the
          programmer complete freedom to choose identifiers.          

       5) The one statement per line principle (of course
          continuation lines are allowed with a special syntax)
          makes programs more robust. 

       6) Added blanks (space characters) are insignificant 
          (except in character constants) this also contributes 
          to the robustness of FORTRAN programs.

       7) Linking with the mathematical library doesn't require
          any compiler option (in C you to have to use "-lm").

 g) Last but not least, FORTRAN compilers usually emit much better
    diagnostic messages.

 In summary, we can say that the difference between Fortran and C, 
 is the difference between a language designed for numerical computations, 
 and a language designed for other purposes (system programming).

  +---------------------------------------------+
  |                                             |
  |     SUMMARY OF FORTRAN ADVANTAGES           |
  |     =============================           |
  |     a) Scientifically oriented              |
  |     b) Better optimized code                |
  |     c) A lot of existing code               |
  |     d) Easier to learn                      |
  |     e) More efficient mathematics           |
  |     f) Easier to use and more robust        |
  |     g) Better diagnostics                   |
  |                                             |
  +---------------------------------------------+