Yeah, F77 really does suck. (I think its biggest problem is its lack of structs - either you end up with subroutines that have a billion arguments or you pass around everything in common blocks, which are essentially global variables.) F90/95 may be a solution, but at this point my hatred of anything fortran is so strong (irrational, probably) that I'm not sure I'm willing to look into it.
The article linked to and mfago correctly point out that being able to understand and easily modify a program are the keys to getting performance that can be gained by algorithmic hacks. If you could program and modify C++/F95 as quickly as Erlang/Python then you would have a truly fast program, but it ain't gonna happen.
I sure know which of the two groups of languages I prefer to program in, though...
Whoa. 5.61 (quantum chemistry) looks identical to the 1990 version. Not that anything has changed in the last 12 years in undergraduate quantum chemistry, of course.
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Yeah, F77 really does suck. (I think its biggest problem is its lack of structs - either you end up with subroutines that have a billion arguments or you pass around everything in common blocks, which are essentially global variables.) F90/95 may be a solution, but at this point my hatred of anything fortran is so strong (irrational, probably) that I'm not sure I'm willing to look into it.
The article linked to and mfago correctly point out that being able to understand and easily modify a program are the keys to getting performance that can be gained by algorithmic hacks. If you could program and modify C++/F95 as quickly as Erlang/Python then you would have a truly fast program, but it ain't gonna happen.
I sure know which of the two groups of languages I prefer to program in, though...
Whoa. 5.61 (quantum chemistry) looks identical to the 1990 version. Not that anything has changed in the last 12 years in undergraduate quantum chemistry, of course.
This is a pay-per-click ad that you're posting on Slashdot?!?
Likely as not... I picked up Holy Fire since Sterling was so cool in his interview. Tonight on the subway home I ran across this passage (p 287):
"They had found the physical source of Warshaw's palace: it was datastriped through a series of servers in the Pacific island of Nauru."
The palace referred to is the one Mia/Maya inherited at the beginning of the book.