Re: How's dot.net doing nowadays?


"dpb" <none@xxxxxxx> wrote in message news:fn5jg7$tid$1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Ralph wrote:
<snipped>

Was going to let this one lay but...
I agree here completely. FORTRAN (now Fortran) was the historical
language for the "math" types (and still is for a significant fraction
of "real" computing)...

One does find numerous articles on how to select the "Best Language"
etc.
But in actual practice I have found that most programmers end up with a
language primarily because it was what was at hand at the time, or what
someone was willing to pay for. BUT they will later defend to the death
that
it was their own idea all along. <g>

In my experience outside engineering organizations (and often even
there) the decision was edicted by management irrespective of any
technical argument. One former employer mandated C years ago. AFAIK,
every piece of code from that point on had a one-line main() which
called the Fortran code that did all the work. Technically, it was a C
shop. :)

Then, of course, there was the DOD ADA-directive. I could enumerate
many other specific examples as well as am sure others here can also...


The calling convention that we call "stdcall" today, was originally
keyworded "_fortran", and was included as a compiler option for exactly that
reason.

-ralph


.

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