> > There's a much more compelling reason to accept FORTRAN as the > > language for BLAS and LAPACK: it's the language in which those two > > libraries were originally written and are maintained even today. A > > full rewrite would be a big task and would require > extremely careful > > testing.
> A full rewrite would be an interesting task > > How many man years would be expected is hard to say > > I guess it would take many years even if you had many highly > skilled people in both FORTRAN and the new language and by > the way what language would one want to use instead of > FORTRAN and why? Given that there seems to be interest on the topic, I would like to add that, as far as I know, FORTRAN stores array elements in column-major order (http://sources.redhat.com/ml/gsl-discuss/2000/msg00425.html), whereas C (just to mention one, but most APL implementation as well) stores array elements in row-major order. My guess is that a complete rewrite would force a change in the internal representation (or would have to pay the price of cache misses) which would also mean a complete rewrite of all the interfaces with other languages. In other words, it would force everybody to redo their library bindings. Not a popular move... -- WildHeart'2k6 - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] My digipics and blogs: http://spaces.msn.com/members/wildy2k5/ [[Philosophy 101: If a man speaks in the woods, // and there's no woman there to hear him... is he still wrong?]] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
