On 17 January 2014 08:56, Bob Dunlop <bob.dunlop@???> wrote:
>
> I don't know but I bet it's humungous.
> Ever since university when I was introduced to the phenomena (they actually
> used the guys work as an example of how not to do things), whenever I see
> Fortran mentioned I think "Dumb physicist who knows no other way to do
> matrix maths". Closely followed by "Dumb physicist with huge N-dimensional
> arrays with only half a dozen set points" and "haven't they heard of sparse
> matrix calculations".
>
> The only thing 30 years has taught me about the Fortran rule is that "Dumb
> physicist" is an assumption, works just as well for "Dumb chemist", "Dumb
> geoscientist" etc. The assumption that Fortan will be a memory hog holds.
>
Fortran has some advantages when used for maths calculations. It
handles exception cases in floating point calculations that few other
languages do.
Caveat being that you can use specially designed math libraries with
other languages to achieve handling of exception cases in floating
point calculations.
fortran has methods for properly handling spare matrix, but a "dumb
physicist" maybe was not aware of them.
Don't get me wrong, the last time I used fortran was 20 years ago, but
I do recognize the areas where fortran can be the best tool.
As an example, the last complex mathematics algorithm I had to
implement, I did it in C with a special maths lib to ensure the
accuracy of the results.
The algorithm was taking data in from 150 data streams, doing its
calculations and producing results in real time. It was working on
streams of global positioning data, and endevouring to detect
positioning errors in the data streams.
Kind Regards
James
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