MATLAB2Python

[John J. Lee]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:

> beliavsky at aol.com wrote:
> 
> > The Fortran standards committee takes
> > backwards compatibility much more seriously, so that code you write
> > now will not take on a new meaning in future versions of the language.
> 
> This is an unfair characterization.  They most certainly take
> backwards compatibility *seriously*, but perhaps they put a
> higher value on making changes that, in their opinion, make
> significant improvements to the language, or fix serious
> mistakes they made in the original.

Yeah.  I was initially shocked that they'd even consider such a
change, but I was persuaded that a) it was significantly useful, b) it
was taken after very careful consideration of what the Right Thing
was, c) it's not as scary a change as it looks.


> Maybe that's a reason
> that Python is being adopted more, while FORTRAN growth is, uh,
> somewhat flat.
[...]

I was going to claim that's a weak point: Fortran growth is flat
because everyone who could benefit from a fast, numerical
analysis-friendly compiler is already using Fortran.  On reflection,
though, I guess that's not true: there are a lot of people using
languages like C++ to write this sort of numerical code.  Swapping
Fortran for C++ certainly seems a questionable decision now: keep the
Fortran, and add some Python.


John