FORTRAN (and later Fortran) were big on minis and workstations aimed at the
scientific market. Compared to "languages with pointers", Fortran is
a very rigid language that lets the compiler go wild with optimization,
automatic concurrency (OpenMP, GNU MP), and automatic vectorization (AltiVec,
VMX, MMX, SSE, 3dNow!, VIS, ...). Built-in COMPLEX support is just icing on the
cake.
Find me a numerical methods coder who's never heard of BLAS or LAPACK and...
and... um... I'll voluntarily buy a copy of Windows and run Java on it.
"To this very day", [accelerated] math libraries are based on that
FORTRAN code from the NETLIB archive. IBM's ESSL and MASS; Intel's Math Kernel
Library; Sun's SUNPERF library; RougeWave Math.h++, AMD's Core Math Library, the
list goes on....
So even if you're not doing stuff in FORTRAN, if you're doing linear algebra,
it's likely someone else did something in FORTRAN and you're using it.
I still can't get used to being able to start a Fortran statement in the first
column....
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