[pjc50]

That's some serious sour grapes by Allen. Her assertion that Fortran and COBOL are higher level than C is .. difficult to support given the reliance of both languages on GOTO.

The assertion that compilers weren't taught any more is just silly.

[nickpsecurity]

Here's an experienced C programmer and fan telling you a list of ways Fortran is higher-level and superior to C for numeric programming:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html

[jedbrown]

Most everything here is subjective, inaccurate, or outdated by C99, save Fortran's multi-dimensional array handling which is legitimately superior to C despite partial reconciliation by VLAs.

[nickpsecurity]

Well, darn, there goes that. I'll have to re-examine it with C99 reference to assess it's accuracy.

[pjc50]

I don't think it's quite that bad, but "for numeric programming" is a very important caveat here. As is "define higher-level".

[nickpsecurity]

I think higher level would be effecient, English-like representation that's closer to algorithm pseudo-code than managing machine details.

[rbanffy]

I don't remember seeing many GO TO's in post-F77 FORTRAN. When did this exchange happen?

[unscaled]

Higher level does not necessarily mean more modern language features and paradigm - it only means language's computation model is farther removed from the actual hardware.

Allen was specifically discussing auto-optimizations (what we nowadays would just call 'compiler optimizations') and essentially argued that low level languages, in the quest of allowing fine-grained manual optimization, prevent many types of advanced auto-optimizations.

Specifically speaking, it is well known that FORTRAN still often beats C in numerical calculations just by the virtue of not supporting pointer aliasing (especially pointers pointing to arbitrary positions in the middle of an array which is being looped over).

[pjmlp]

Fortran is certainly higher level than C, given lack of aliasing and no decay of arrays into pointers.

[nickpsecurity]

You should bookmark this for future discussions bringing up Fortran. Great write-up.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch1-2.html