Fundamentally I agree with you. In my original comment, I was just trying to give a historical view of why people took the view that "optimizing Fortran compil

Fundamentally I agree with you. In my original comment, I was just trying to give a historical view of why people took the view that "optimizing Fortran compilers are hard to beat," rather than to defend it. Personally, I think that idea is hard to justify these days, especially when, in my experience, finding 20-30% speed differences between optimizing Fortran compilers isn't all that hard.