Re:Fortran still in use (Score 1)

Fortran is still in use, but only because lots of people believe, it is cheaper (time wise) to fix existing code than make a paradigm shift. I wrote all my code for heavy number crunching for my PhD these in FORTRAN 77 using PVM for massive parallelization. I spend days debugging code, since prototyping does not exist and subroutine calling sequence did not match after some changes.

Three years ago, I finally gave it up and switched to C++. Almost all my code is rewritten since. You can always start writing a C++ wrapper class around existing and running FORTRAN code, to utilize it in new projects.

I noticed, that my developing cycles are much shorter now, since less debugging is necessary. In the mean time we have a farm of Linux PC's and they are feed in C++ through a simple PVM++ wrapper class in a much cleaner way as I used to do it in FORTRAN. Less code is necessary in switching to an OO paradigm.

I do not look back on the times, I was programming FORTRAN. FORTRAN is not clean and nice. It is dirty, has lots of memory problems, since FORTRAN does only know pointers in calling sequences and therefore the subroutine has no change to check consistency of the arguments.

Of course, you can formulate any problem in any programming language. It is just a question of efficency.

Let me finish with a comment on the Alpha boxes: Some time ago, I looked into buying an "killer box" based on the alpha for heavy number crunching. However, I only got a factor of two speed increase out of an alpha testbox. Since my appliation using heavly threads and PVM it turns out to be cheaper per MFLOP moneywise to buy a SMP x86 box than an ALPHA or even MAC G4 based system. The last buy for our institute were two PII 400 dual 128MB RAM boxes for total $2500 in 8/1999.

Your milege might vary, especially if you spent $10000 or $100000 on your boxes. But I bet, your MFLOP/buck rate is even lower.