multidimensional arrays and using C for numerical work

[Ken Turkowski]

In article <251 at harvard.ARPA> breuel at harvard.ARPA (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>BTW, who wants to displace FORTRAN from its dominating position in
>numerical computing? And why would you want to replace it with 'C'?
>'C' is not very suited to numerical applications anyhow; the automatic
>promotion of float to double, and the lack of handling
>of over- and underflow are some of the problems. (Flames to me -- I
>love flames. Don't clutter the net with them).

<Disregarding flame warning>
Numerical algorithms in C are much easier to maintain, as well as more
transportable.  'C' is a language, not an implementation.  The
automatic promotion of float to double, as well as chars and shorts to
longs on machines whose int is long, are both performance bugs that I
suspect will be fixed by someone in the near future.

The handling (i.e. interrupts) of overflow and underflow is an
operating system problem, and has nothing to do with the C language.
It should be able to be solved with a subroutine call.
-- 
Ken Turkowski @ CADLINC, Menlo Park, CA
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