Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : tenser
Date : Fri Jan 12 2024 10:03:37

On 11 Jan 2024 at 08:06a, Dr. What pondered and said...
 
 DW> -=> tenser wrote to Dr. What <=-
 DW> 
 DW>  te> Fortran 2018, actually.  It only bears a passing resemblance
 DW>  te> to FORTRAN-77, let along -66 or IV (or earlier).
 DW> 
 DW> That's what I figured.  When I was researching FORTRAN not too long ago,
 DW> the YouTube tutorials in "newer" FORTRAN were very interesting.

Yup.  Object oriented FORTRAN for the win!

 DW> I've always felt that FORTRAN was a "medium level" programming language.
 DW> That is, not at the assembly language level, but close enough to the
 DW> hardware that it could be very fast.
 DW> 
 DW> It's an awful tool for doing things like UIs, but is wonderful for just
 DW> crunching numbers.

I suppose that's not a bad characterization, but I would point
out that often even higher-level things can be really aggressively
optimized.  There was a language about 20 years ago called "sisal"
that was meant as a potential Fortran replacement; it was a
functional language, but meant to be familiar to scientists and
engineers and so on.  It compiled down to Fortran.  A few years
later, someone did an APL implementation called "APEX" that
compiled to sisal, that compiled to Fortran.  The idea is that,
in APL you have all of these very high-level operations, like,
"compute matrix determinant" or "sum this vector".  APL compilers,
consequently, can do very high-level optimizations of APL programs;
Sisal, in turn, could do a lot of medium-level optimizations of
combining functions and things like that, while the system Fortran
compiler could do all sorts of low-level optimizations like constant
folding, instruction selection (using vector instructions? etc).
So you'd get crazy optimized machine code at the end of this long
pipeline, for very high-level conceptual code.

.... The shortest distance between two points is under construction

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