From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Jul 26 22:25:58 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.ptd.net (mail1.ha-net.ptd.net [207.44.96.65]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 7091737B7A7 for ; Wed, 26 Jul 2000 22:25:54 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tms2@mail.ptd.net) Received: (qmail 11367 invoked from network); 27 Jul 2000 05:26:02 -0000 Received: from du06.cli.ptd.net (HELO mail.ptd.net) (204.186.33.6) by mail.ptd.net with SMTP; 27 Jul 2000 05:26:02 -0000 Message-ID: <397FC7C8.D1C7BBD9@mail.ptd.net> Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 01:25:28 -0400 From: "Thomas M. Sommers" Organization: None X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.72 [en] (X11; I; FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Brett Glass Cc: cjclark@alum.mit.edu, "Jason C. Wells" , chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Language for Modeling Mechanical System References: <4.3.2.7.2.20000726195620.04ab6ee0@localhost> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Brett Glass wrote: > > At 12:44 AM 7/26/2000, Crist J. Clark wrote: > > >> I figure there just has to be something out there that does mathematical > >> modeling. I just haven't found it yet. > > > >It's what FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) was made for. > > No; despite the name, FORTRAN is very much a general-purpose computing > language. It has only one possible advantage in a mathematical > modeling setting: because of its long use in scientific and engineering > work, FORTRAN compilers traditionally perform extensive optmization on > floating point calculations. The strength reduction, expression > rearrangement, loop unrolling, and parallelization facilities in a > good FORTRAN compiler are second to none. However, with today's fast > PCs, these optimizations aren't necessary unless you're doing VERY > complex modeling -- stuff like fluid dynamics. And since FORTRAN is > rather primitive, you'll spend a lot more time coding than you would > if you had a better tool for this particular task. It also has a builtin complex type, and common math operations such as exponentiation and trig functions are also builtin, and so don't incur function call overhead. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message