Re: Fortran vs. C (was Re: Ken & Klaus.)

beliavsky_at_aol.com
Date: 09/21/04 

Date: 21 Sep 2004 15:39:22 -0700

nessuno@wigner.berkeley.edu (nessuno) wrote in message news:<f76c1166.0409201050.1d7bd2b@posting.google.com>...

<SNIP>

> Here is a question: Is there anything a general purpose programming
> language (like C) needs that a scientific programming language doesn't
> need? I don't think so, especially if you want to write large
> programs. The converse is not true, of course, there are special
> needs for scientific programs, like complex variables, and efficiency
> is paramount. So in an ideal world, we'd have just one language for
> both scientific programming and everything else.

I wonder if an applications programming language (as opposed to a
systems language like C) needs C-like pointers. Fortran 90 does have
something called POINTER, but it is more high-level than that of C. Do
any of Ada, (Visual) Basic, Java, Perl, Python etc. have C-like
pointers? The heavy use of pointers in C and C++ is associated with
many bugs and security problems and can make optimization more
difficult.

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