🚀 go-pugleaf

nuberpaul@nandomail.com (Paul Nuber) wrote in message news:<46223b20.0210172119.334bb773@posting.google.com>...
> uncle Al wants it to work in windows, he may not have a fortran compiler.

g77 is available for windows, and is surprisingly good for the price. 

> It is more easy with python.  

The point was to provide something which a human with no in depth
knowledge of programming has a good chance of understanding. Since
fortran has been pretty stable since 1966, there's a better chance
that a mature scientist has at least seen it before. For the python
you posted, we needed to "import math", know about the range function,
have some notion of objects to handle the file and realise that the
line noise is a format statement. For the fortran you had to know to
how to compile (g77 myfile.f), execute and save the results (a.exe >
outputfile), and probably be aware of the implicit typing if you
wanted to change it. For both you needed some idea of a loop, either
"for" or "do" syntax. Both examples present their own problems for a
programming novice, so without wanting to start a religous war, I
don't understand why any one language is "more easy" than another. I
would be interested to seen an implementation using recursion instead
of loops, ideally in haskell, since I keep meaning to try and learn a
bit of it.

Cheers,

Jon

PS: Since fortran is usually at least 10 times faster than plain
python, I personally find that my development time for number
crunching applications is correspondingly reduced :)