In the scientific field, everyone uses Fortran ... I have no idea why. They are having me write Fortran code at work and I tell you, its terrible. Fortran, historically, is faster than C for mathematical operations. Fortran takes advantage, of say, processor features that the C math library might not. Fortran math functions are also built into the language, whereas C math functions are actual functions and potentially introduce overhead (unless they are perhaps inline'd ... but they'd still have to move values into math registers). However, today, most Fortran compilers use the standard C library ... at least those made by GNU and GNU advocates ... so you gain no speed benefit at all. The language is also a little inconsistent on syntax, minus say, the stupid column rules (for Fortran 77).
write (*,*) 'moo said the cow ', x, ' times.'
Now, I know what his mumbo jumbo (*,*) means, these are the file descriptor and format code label ... but this is the only place in the language where this syntax appears ... thats just an example of inconsistent syntax. To make things worse, but there are no standard libraries that come with Fortran and those compilers that I've seen come with no documentation for Fortran functions. I think that C and especially C++ are way better for research than Fortran. Fortran 90 (the newest spaghetti!) boasts features C/C++ had since their inception years and years ago! For example, Fortran 90 can make structs and do operator overloading now ... woo!
This language needs to die ...
