🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Aug27.152740.29641@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca> mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel) writes:
>In article <l9p02vINNorv@almaak.usc.edu> ajayshah@almaak.usc.edu (Ajay Shah)
>writes:
[....]
>	     with C's awful syntactic conventions.  (To quote Carlin:
>	     "These are my rules, I make them up!"  More seriously, C
>	     and C++ violate criterion (1).  For example, I learned Fortran
>	     by writing a library which performs certain quantum chemical
>	     calculations.  As far as I know, this library is still in use.
>	     I doubt that I could have undertaken such a project in C and
>	     completed it in the alloted time without at least some prior
>	     experience with the language.)
>
>          3) You can convert Fortran code to C code, but if you want to
>	     have any chance of maintaining it, you had better hold on to
>	     the Fortran code.  The old libraries and programs are still
>	     useful and we can't just throw them away.
>

It is a mistake to compare C++ to C.  With a set of good matrix class
libraries, and some experience with array languages, you can begin
programming immediately in C++, not to mention with many times the
productivity of FORTRAN.  C++ is all about interface.  Let a
specialist design the classes (i.e., the interface) and the
scientist/engineer can go from there.  And I don't throw away my
Fortran - I write C++ wrappers for them.  That way I can merrily
factorize and decompose without having to keep track of all those
Fortran subroutine arguments (because the C++ objects take care of all
that), and I don't have to mess with those cryptic function names
(because I can overload function names and the C++ object knows what
to do).  And if I do want to get into object-oriented programming I
can design my own classes, for example, I could design a new data type
that suited my problem.  With a templated matrix class all I would
have to do is provide functions for computing the operations of a new
data type, for example, +, -, *, and /, for interval numbers, and I
would instantly have an array language with interval numbers.  In fact
with not much trouble I could declare a multi-dimensional array of
double precision rational complex interval numbers (if that was what I
wanted).  
   I think it is a huge mistake to try to do numeric programming in C,
but such a judgment doesn't generalize to C++.