Re: Clearly, it is too late to fix c99 - C is dead

beliavsky_at_aol.com
Date: 09/27/04 

Date: 27 Sep 2004 05:57:28 -0700

Chris Barts <chbarts@gmail.com> wrote in message news:<pan.2004.09.27.05.51.28.371054@gmail.com>...
 
> There is plenty of legacy code written in C. This is why compilers usually
> support pre-Standard constructs, and it is why languages that look like C
> (and, to some extent, act like C) thrive, while Fortran and Cobol and Lisp
> descendants have failed. There's nothing to suggest that C is becoming any
> less relevant with time.

I think the statement "Fortran has failed" is wrong. Many scientists
and engineers still consider it the best tool for getting their work
done. Enough people are writing code in Fortran 95 to support about 10
compiler vendors (see
http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/Fortran/Compilers/
). There is a general trend towards using higher-level languages, and
Fortran is a higher-level language than either C or C++ for numerical
work, especially involving multidimensional arrays.

The Fortran 2003 standard was ratified a few weeks ago, and its new
features include OOP with inheritance, interoperability with C, IEEE
arithmetic, and stream I/O. Already some F95 compilers have added some
of these features.

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