Re: Suitability of Lua as a First Programming Language?

[Miles Bader <miles@...>]

Coda Highland <chighland@gmail.com> writes:
>> I have read many times that FORTRAN is better Than C for number
>> crunching buy I do not know WHY?
>
> Long story short, it's actually not. Once upon a time, it was, when C
> was a systems programming language and FORTRAN was explicitly created
> for mathematics. Now, not so much -- with the GNU tools, both
> languages compile down to essentially the same thing and are
> essentially equivalent in performance.

Hmm, I seem to recall that fortran programs benefit from different
language rules regarding aliasing, such that a fortran compiler can
ignore potential aliasing in situations where a C compiler can not.

Aliasing issues can be a significant problem for optimizers, so this
additional freedom can result in better optimization.  This is
especially the case with a lot of matrix-heavy math codes.

Now, given the degree to which fortran and C compilers often share
infrastructure these days, I don't know the degree to which optimizers
actually make good use of this additional freedom, but it is a
potential benefit, and it's certainly possible to take advantage of
it, even in a multiple language compiler.

-Miles

-- 
.Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.