Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

["M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>]

"I have read many times that FORTRAN is better Than C for number crunching buy I do not know WHY?"

That was true in the late 1980s but is no longer the case. It's somewhat complicated, but with a couple of breakthroughs in compiler technology and some education of programmers, C became competitive with FORTRAN for *new* number-crunching code. There are still millions of lines of legacy FORTRAN out there and there's little reason to port them to C, but it's now possible to write C or C++ code for number crunching that's just as efficient as FORTRAN. Look up the Convex vectorizing C compiler and the Multiflow "trace scheduling" compiler for the nitty-gritty details.

On Mon, Dec 3, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Martin Krpan <wtxnh-lua@yahoo.com.au> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 01, 2012 at 02:12:06PM -0800, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> C was designed for writing systems programs - operating systems and
> compilers. It took about ten years for the compilers to get good
> enough for it to be competitive with FORTRAN for number crunching.

I have read many times that FORTRAN is better Than C for number
crunching buy I do not know WHY?

Obviously I am missing some knowledge therefore can somebody please
educate me as I do not thing that FORTRAN can calculate faster than C
statement like
c = a + b
or even
c = sqrt(exp(a, 2), exp(b, 2))
so what is that makes the difference...?

Martin

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