Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by geoalchimista 2895 days ago
Modern Fortran (90 to 2008) has evolved a lot regarding array arithmetic and broadcasting, yet still maintain backward compatibility. I don't think that couldn't be done in C, but as many has pointed out, the problem seems to be why bother when there are already C++/D/Java/C#/Go/Rust ...

However, I'd recommend people who deal heavily with multidimensional arrays but couldn't sacrifice the low-level C environment for a dynamic language to consider using the ISO_C_BINDING of Fortran 2003. It provides fully C compatible native types, and can be compiled together with C (you get gfortran from GCC anyway).
1 comments
macintux 2894 days ago
Without knowing Fortran, I’d speculate it’s easier to maintain backwards compatibility in a language that doesn’t have as direct a mapping to hardware as C. Fortran seems to have more abstractions built in.
link
geoalchimista 2893 days ago
That's true. It predated C but even then abstracted the user away from the hardware (and still does). I wouldn't suggest any use of Fortran beyond number crunching and array arithmetic.
link