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Modern FORTRAN looks more like Matlab than FORTRAN 77. The syntax has been completely overhauled since at least ‘95. For a while I was translating my Matlab co

Modern FORTRAN looks more like Matlab than FORTRAN 77. The syntax has been completely overhauled since at least ‘95. For a while I was translating my Matlab codes to FORTRAN; it was surprisingly easy. But I was being too naive with array resizings in Matlab and most of the speed gain (which was like 2-3 orders of magnitude) could be achieved in Matlab itself by preallocating memory. To this day I have the nervous tick of initializing arrays with zeros even in numpy.

rufius 8y ago
> To this day I have the nervous tick of initializing arrays with zeros even in numpy. I dunno - I wouldn’t call that a nervous tick. If you know or have a good idea of how much memory you need, then it only seems polite to let the runtime/OS know ahead of time. I think of it like RSVP’ing to a dinner party. Host is very appreciative when they know how many people they’re serving.
- bobbylarrybobby 8y ago
  It is a tic — if you plan to fill the array anyway there’s no need to set its values on initialization
  - sgillen 8y ago
    No but in dynamic languages just making the array before hand can greatly increase efficiency.
whatshisface 8y ago
>To this day I have the nervous tick of initializing arrays with zeros even in numpy. The typical way to create arrays in Numpy is with `np.zeros(size)`. What is it that you're doing?
- eru 8y ago
  Or you can create them as outputs from your computations.
- pithon 8y ago
  Note there's also `np.empty(size)` if you know you're going to initialize all the values in a later step, in which case it can skip assigning zeros to every element.
dreamcompiler 8y ago
Just a mild FYI: That word is 'tic' without the 'k'. Pronounced the same, but a different word.