On Sat, Jun 02, 2007 at 01:37:02PM -0600, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: > Fortran 2003 seems like it could be a fine programming language for > agent models. It has all the common OOP features. An argument for > Fortran, I suppose, would be superior numerical performance. I doubt > it would be that big of a win, though, due to the fact that agent codes > tends to be rate limited by memory latency and CPU indirect mispredicts, > more than poor code generation of particular loops. >
The legendry performance of Fortran is due to its restrictive interpretation of arrays and variable in Fortran77 - all variables are staticly allocated rather than stack allocated, arguments are never aliased, everything has to be expressed as a loop over an array of simple data types. Come Fortran 90 or Fortran 2003 which adds a lot of interesting features to the language that C++ or Java has, and performance is not so easy to attain, unless one restricts oneself to the Fortran 77 subset. It is certainly possible to achieve equivalent performance in C++ to Fortran 77 code. However, it is not as easy to do so - it tends to require a good understanding of C++ and how compilers optimise codes. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Mathematics UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
