🚀 go-pugleaf

Mike Rilee (mrilee@cicero.gsfc.nasa.gov) wrote:
: John Strohm wrote:
: > 
: > Richard Pitre wrote:
: > >Why leave out complex numbers and complex
: > >transcendental functions?
: > 
: > Because Oberon is a systems programming language, not a number-crunching
: > language.
: > 
: > If you wanna crunch complex numbers with complex transcendental functions,
: > and you don't want to code it yourself, you need to be coding in FORTRAN.
: > This is what FORTRAN was designed to do.
: > 
: > Use the right tool for the right job.

: Yes, and FORTRAN was also designed to read punch-cards just
: like the Jacquard loom.

: I find that distinguishing systems programming from numeric
: programming is not so helpful these days. In order to
: run a big job one often has to coordinate the actions of
: several to several tens (hundreds ?) of machines. Even if
: one is not programming a parallel computer one often finds
: that one machine handles the batch queue, another handles
: the mass storage, another does the visualization, while yet
: another actually runs the numeric code.  The whole process
: is tied together with shell scripts, and non-standard system
: calls from FORTRAN. At least from a users point of view. :)


: -- 
: Mike Rilee NASA/GSFC Mailstop 930.0 Greenbelt, MD 20771
: mrilee@cicero.gsfc.nasa.gov Ph. (301)286-9867 Fx. (301)286-1777


If you're interested in a modern object oriented langauge which is
well suited for scientific programming (and lots of other things)
I urge you to try Sather.  I have been successfully using it on 
my own research programs for a long time. 

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sather

Personally, I think its language design surpasses oberon substantially.


Ada95 might be another practical option. 

For systems programming, what does O give you over Modula-3, whose runtime
gives you *now* portable distributed objects?