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> Up to a few years ago, I found often myself in discussions with colleagues on the benefits of Fortran vs. less horrible languages such as C. In the context o
by goerz 8y ago
> Up to a few years ago, I found often myself in discussions with colleagues on the benefits of Fortran vs. less horrible languages such as C.
In the context of numerics, C is in no way a "less horrible language" than Fortran. The necessity to use pointers in C for multidimensional arrays, and the large amount of "undefined behavior" in the C standard makes it almost impossible to write bug-free number-crunching code. In particular when the person writing the code is a scientist/engineer, not a professional programmer or computer scientist, they are guaranteed to shoot themselves in the foot with C or C++.
- 4thaccount 8y agoYea...I can write reasonably performant Fortran, but have no clue how to do matrices in C without resorting to the numerical methods book that doesn't allow you to use it's algorithms and has the dumbest license ever (is it called numerical recipes in C)...the Amazon comments are illuminating.
- x3tm 8y agoWe commonly used the GSL library. http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/
- dagw 8y agoGSL has its own set of license 'problems' to be aware of in that it's GPL and not LGPL.
- 4thaccount 8y agoThat might work for siof my use cases, but it stinks that you can't use it for a commercial product.