Sun Releases Fortran Replacement as OSS 233
sproketboy writes "Sun Microsystems has released an alpha version of a new programming language called Fortress to eventually replace Fortran for high performance scientific computing tasks. Fortress was designed specifically for multi-core processors and is published under the BSD license."
Doesn't make a difference. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Doesn't make a difference. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Thanks for shattering my illusions. I thought programming languages were as they were, are, and always will be. I'm going to sue you.
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Fortran has some coolness (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
Re:Fortran has some coolness (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote a Fortran program that printed out a calendar with the year in a banner font at the top. It took 57 cards (no library calls etc, beyound PRINT). Try do anything useful in 57 lines with today's languages.
Mike.
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Yes, because in physics, nothing is like anything else. (rolls eyes)
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Yes, because in physics, nothing is like anything else. (rolls eyes)
Nah, that's not what I'm saying. It's just that OOP can sometimes obscure what's going on and just add unneeded complexity to a program. I had a friend do some Monte Carlo stuff, and he used all kinds of OOP in his code, and it was done in a sane way. But trying to debug that code was hell. There's a place for everything, and I'm not convinced that simulations are the place for it.
Mike.
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Naturally in many types of scientific programming, object-oriened design isn't strictly necessary and can get in your way. Most of these programs are simple programs designed to do one task -- calculate this or simulate that. But as you get more and more complex, with lots of little discrete parts that need to interact in specific ways, object-oriented design is, IMHO, the only way to go.
The problem with
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If debugging is hard it can be for a couple of different reasons. You may have poor debugging tools. Or the object abstraction
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I am not a programmer. I learned everything I know about programming from jokes going around the internet, like the "How to shoot yourself in the foot with different programming languages" one. The entry in that for C++ reads something like
C++
You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can't tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying "That's me, over there."
Something doesn't quite agree with your post, though I'll be damned if I can tell what it is.
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Because Molecular Dynamics doesn't deal at all with self-contained interacting entities!
Chris Mattern
Fortran aint that fast... (Score:4, Interesting)
But when I was postgrad at university, I helped a Math mate recode some department apps used in his thesis from Fortran into 'C'.
The end result is the damn stuff ran faster. I looked into it more deeply to try to understand the difference - was it that I (comp-sci major) was coding the apps more cleanly than the original math majors?
Details are lost - it was a while ago - but I do recall that the 'C' libs were doing most floating point operations faster than fortran. Not just the low level co-processor stuff, but also the more complex operations.
Surprised the heck out of both of us. I suspected at the time that it was just the variant of fortran we were running on Vax's, but didn't bother checking further.
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Re:Fortran aint that fast... (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortran (and Ada) are languages that understand arrays.
In C, an array is a pointer, an offset, and a prayer.
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Mike.
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Maybe... an OS?
And it would still be easier to debug than Windows.
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You've never tried to write anything in Perl, have you?
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Wellllllll... (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose increased multi-processor support would be nice. It'll all depend on performance.
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You may as well say the STL is bad because it gives you multiple data structures!
Only the basic array is part of the Java language, all the other structures are library based (exactly like C++ with STL!)
Talk about FUD
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Plenty of languages--including FORTRAN, which is the language this new one is intending to replace--make do with just the one array implementation. If you're going to be doing anythi
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The language tries to mimic mathematical notation and thus it wants to appeal to scientists more than anyone else. You if you are a regular programmer that does web development or database or anything except scientific computing, there is nothing for you to see here, move along. You can still safely continue using Java or C++.
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The source form looks more like Algol60 printed on a flexowriter (all aged programmers will recognise this blast from the past.) There is some resemblence to BCPL. But the language is much more complex than anything most people will be familiar with.
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a minor hack in either.
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What's it look like? (Score:2)
Read the FAQ (Score:5, Informative)
This one looks like a winner.
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In a sense, yes. The real question, however, is why this wasn't done earlier? Sure we have to type in code in ASCII because we're stuck with keyboards to enter it with, but that doesn't mean the default view has to be ASCII. Really, why not let your IDE render it into proper mathematical symbols for you? As a mathematician it looks damn appealing to me.
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Because as programmers, we'd rather not have what essentially is a whole new edit-compile-debug cycle just to type the damn code. IDEs are great, and they vastly improve productivity, but they start to hurt productivity if they are required to do something with your code.
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I was rather expecting the IDE to render it on the fly as you enter it, which, really, makes it no harder to deal with that mistyping a variable name (easier, in fact, given that if mistyped it won't render to the appropriate symbol). You c
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Yes and yes but obscure doesn't mean usless.
I don't know about Fortress but Fortran is still used because it is the best tool for the job. If you have are really large dataset program that you hand off to a programmer he or she may use Fortran for that program.
Why is Fortran still a good solution?
1. It is really easy to optimize.
2. It has a lot of very useful and tested libr
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Looks sort of like Maple...
I am wondering, as a college student who is beginning to get into a financial profession typically dealing with immense datasets, how much value will this be to scientists/mathematicians/statisticians? Wouldn't it make more sense to prototype something in Maple, PERL, etc... and hand it off to programmers to implement a full model at top speed? In other words, is there any value to learning FORTRESS analagously to the value of learning FORTRAN in the 70s-80s? Haven't advances in computing rendered these languages obscure?
Anyone doing modeling with extremely large datasets wish to comment? Should I bother to pursue low-level programming languages?
Looks a lot like Pascal, too.
Let me speak as a scientist. Looking at the example in Fortress, this is beneficial for some of my colleagues who are not programmers per se. It allows them to maybe focus on the math instead of the logic and overhead (small as it is) of actually writing a code. Somethings cannot be modeled in Maple, for example, and then handed off to programmers to implement. Secondly, there is the chance not all programmers would understand the underlying science that would allow them to
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The aim is that mathematicians can simply write it in Fortress and get a full model at top speed. Fortress is designed to be able top do high performance computing. F
Re:What's it look like? (Score:4, Funny)
### The following is the canonical 'Hello World' program implemented in fortress ###
load fortran77
print *,"Hello World"
fortress.obfuscate
end program Hello_world
Re:What's it look like? (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortress uses a lot of unicode mathematical operators, which slashdot will quite pitifully fail to display.
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And most keyboards will pitifully fail to type, in any straightforward and reliable way.
And most monitors will fail to display unambiguously, in any straightforward and reliable way.
Programming should be based on mathematics, not written in it -- and that's from someone who writes specialist mathematical libraries for a living. Seriously, if TeX is the least friendly programming environment I h
Re:What's it look like? (Score:4, Funny)
You may not have noticed, but cutting-edge monitors nowadays are capable of displaying graphics, and not just text.
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They did think of that you know. They provide ASCII equivalents, akin to TeX, that let you type stuff in, and then it gets rendered to the appropriate symbol.
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This is also something I'm really looking forward to in Perl 6; I'm guessing the conversation went like this:
Guy: "Here's an idea - let's require the coders to use a lot of characters that aren't on the keyboard!"
Other Guy: "Brilliant!"
I'm sure productivity will skyrocket with this invention.
They also seem to have jumped on the (to me) unfathomable "using braces to clearly delineate code blocks is evil!" bandwagon. I guess it's what all th
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component HelloWorld
export Executable
run(args) = print "Hello, world!"
end
This is fake... (Score:5, Insightful)
Bah... Slashvertisement...
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APL (Score:3, Insightful)
``Mathematical notation: We would like to reduce the time it takes for a domain expert to turn a mathematical specification into a working high-performance program. We are examining language changes which would enable computations to be written in a more mathematical format.''
So does this mean they will bring back APL?
Personally, I find functional notation and names much easier to understand than mathematical notation and symbols. Of course, I'm not a mathematician, so I guess I'm not the target audience for this project. However, I still think this is a really bad idea.
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I think that depends on what you mean by mathematical notation and symbols. In the case of Fortress that means Unicode input and the ability to actually render code, thus x^2 gets rendered with a proper superscript 2, array indexes a[i] get rendered to ap
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I'm not sure that's a good idea, either, since reals and floats are different things. Reals have infinite precision, whereas precision is finite for floats.
``The result is that you can enter mathematics via the keyboard and have it rendered in code with captial sigma for sums, standard arrows and cartesian product symbols to denote function signatures, actual square root
Re:APL (Score:4, Interesting)
In Fortress the basic types ZZ and RR provide arbitrary preceision integers and floats. If you want a specfied precision then you need, say, ZZ32 or RR64 etc. So in fact it is the correct notation.
Yes, but it is well documented and, if you are at all familiar with mathematics, straightforward to learn (indeed, you almost don't need to learn - instinctually typing in whatever you would say works for most symbols. It is no harder to learn than TeX - easier if you already know TeX in fact.
Sure, it applies to many people. None of them are in the target market for Fortess though. Fortress is aimed at mathematicians and scientists - the sort of people who are still using Fortran - and for them the math notation makes the whole thing much, much easier to read. It all depends on what you're used to. If you're a programmer who reads C and Java all day then that probably looks good to you. If you spend much of your time reading math papers, however, then mathematical syntax looks far more natural the the elaborate and obfuscated look of C. Congratulations, you're not the target market for the language - that doesn't mean it isn't a great idea that will be of great value to many other people.
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APL is my textbook example of a write-only language.
I couldn't figure out in the afternoon what the program I wrote in the morning did (actually, the problem was "how it did it").
There must be a better way.
Cue Fortrain Jokes (Score:5, Funny)
"Q: What will the scientific programming language of 2050 look like? A: No one knows, but it will be called FORTRAN."
"CS without FORTRAN and COBOL is like birthday cake without ketchup and mustard."
"Consistently separating words by spaces became a general custom about the tenth century A.D., and lasted until about 1957, when FORTRAN abandoned the practice."
"The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change."
I'd actually venture that FORTRAN has more jokes about it than C. I for one welcome our FORTRESS-joke-making overlords.
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Another winner from Guy Steele (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very least, Sun has given people something to think about.
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I lack the fortran experience (I've only done the bare minimum of fortran programming), but I do have the math, and from my perspective, having read through the fortress spec (PDF) [sun.com] (okay, I skimmed it - it's huge) it looks like an excellent language for any mathematics intensive work (and indeed physic
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Right. And following another tradition, the various versions of Fortress will be called: Graphite, Gypsum, Apatite, Quartz, and Diamond or something like that.
Multi-core? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Multi-core? (Score:4, Insightful)
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And Sun's latest 8-core jewel, the Niagara T1000, has a _single_ floating-point unit shared by all eight cores. Running scientific codes on the Niagara is not a good way with keeping all 8 cores busy!
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Re:Multi-core? (Score:4, Informative)
Fortress is proposing a language to automate that scaling. They are discussing language features to deal with multi-CPU systems, where multiple memory banks are present. AMD's multi-CPU system's (Opteron) with HyperTransport each have a separate memory banks for each processor. It makes sense to allocate the half of the array used by CPU #1 in CPU #1's memory bank, and the other half used by CPU #2 in CPU #2's memory bank. Then the threads should be split so first pair of cores on CPU #1 work in the first half of the array, and the second pair of cores on CPU #2 work on the activities related to CPU #2. Currently, all these multi-processor mapping activities happens manually, and it really sucks. It would be wonderful if programming languages supported this activity automatically.
I don't know if Fortress is the answer to the multi-core / multi-CPU problem. I hope something is. The computing world needs a solution.
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I beg your pardon, if we need to use and learn a specific language to take advantage of the multicore technology, it is mainly because it is not automatic.
So, I guess learning the language itself is only part of the problem. The other one will be to be able to identify by hand what can take advantage of the multi-cores and how.
I don't see were there is a big advantage to use this language for the users, maybe Sun is seeing much advantages to it
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Fortran does some level of parallelization since F90. Specifically, it has builtin matrix/vector operations, which are inherently parallel operations, so they can be readily parallelized by a compiler. In 2001 I wrote some code at CERN for a dual Pentium III, and the PGF90 compiler made good use of SMP and MMX/SSE.
Of course, there's a lot to improve when it comes to parallelizing code besides vectors/matrices, and I assume Fortress is addressing some of these issues. In any case, a higher-level language
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I assume they really mean multiple cores, whether they are on a single CPU or not. As far as that goes, there is a lot to gain over languages in common use today, as these typically express algorithms in an imperative fashion where only one thing happens at a time.
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Please read about parallelization [wikipedia.org] and how many algorithms, particularly ones that act over sets of data, can be broken into "parallel" and "serial" elements. If your language implies the two and provides syntax to richly describe these, the compiler can smartly break your program down into threads (or procs or distributed procs) and make the parallel ops magically happen at once, without the programmer dealing with threading or synchronization or any of that other junk (and getting a huge boost in performa
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My memories of Fortran (Score:2)
Find a happy place.
Find a happy place.
I don't see anyone trying to give credit where due (Score:5, Insightful)
They are doing this in complete (nearly) opposition to the position that MS takes. I think Sun deserves a little credit. The did (sort of) open some of the hardware as well, and while that may not fall into hobbyists hands soon, it is a start. Opening (in any meaningful fashion) some high end hardware is a big thing.
No, I don't have tons of Sun hardware or software at home, but I do use it at work, and its incredibly stable, if not super easy to administrate.
i totally agree... (Score:2, Informative)
don't get me wrong, i don't think the sun (not much pun intended) shines out of their collective behind. there's still some stuff that grates; service plans just to get the 'recommended' patch clusters. they are moving in the right direction, as parent said.
Intellectual Fortress Commentary (Score:5, Informative)
dozens have tried before (Score:2)
Nothing like FORTRAN (Score:2)
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Will it make any sound?
From the specification, it is Ugly (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems that the only Fortran-esque side of Fortress is that it is aimed at scientific computing and number-crunching. Other than that, the programming paradigm of Fortress is based on object orientation and programming-by-contract. If Java smelled like Smalltalk, Fortress smells like Eiffel.
Fortress has focus on three basic things:
1) programming by contract (pre-conditions and post-conditions of a method)
2) Numerical and dimensional correctness
3) Keeping the programming language as close to mathematical notation as possible.
1) means that people will write more to achieve the same thing with some guarantee of correctness. Much like Java's enforcement of exception handling, an be easily misused.
2) means that Sun bothered to include kelvin, Pascal, meter, second, Newton and every Physical unit you can think of as language keywords, that all parameters should specify what unit they're in, and that the language will do some effort to prevent errors arising from adding oranges and bananas, or precision errors from summing milligrams to some hundreds of kilograms.
3) means that Fortress will make Perl look readable. Good part of the language specification deals on how the editor should render the source code onscreen. The logical AND operator is the upward-pointing wedge symbol of math. The logical OR operator is the downward-poiting wedge symbol. The Integer type is that special-font Z, and a real is that special-font R. The specification deals on how to represent these in an ASCII file, using a meta-language similar to TeX (but incompatible with).
Programming Fortress on anything other than Sun's own IDE will most likely be unfeasible. Think of every math operator you've seen. If you have experience with TeX/LaTeX, think of those 4 pages from symbols.dvi with all symbols you could use. Those are the Fortress operators. Sun has finally come with something mor unreadable and with more operators than Perl. And the operators aren't even ASCII, they're untypeable. The bitwise AND and OR operators are a weird thing I had never seen before (after 5 years of engineering, and 5 years as graduate student in CompSci).
That said, Fortress may even succeed as a niche programming language. But I still have two concerns left:
How will non-scientific code look on it ? Surely Fortress programs will want to open windows, and dialog boxes, access files and the network. The math-oriented syntax has all it takes to make UI programming uglier than C+Xlib.
Sun claims that Fortress is aimed at High Performance Computing. Sun released an alpha interpreter of Fortress, which is written in Java. What kind of sick language designer writes an interpreter in Java to demonstrate something related to High Performance computing ?
Re:From the specification, it is Ugly (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is to say, its aimed at the niche that Fortran, despite how old and creaky it is, still rules. The world of programming has come a long way since Fortran, but nothing matches it for scientific computing and number crunching. To be honest that's about the only aspect of Fortran worth keeping...
You say that like it's a bad thing! Eiffel is, surprisingly enough, a very nice language to work in. I'd be very happy with a language targetted toward numerics (And with real math style notation to boot!) that was as pleasant to work with as Eiffel. Design by contract is a good thing, and importantly it is optional. You can specify a contract or property for a function, but you don't have to. The ability to flesh out an API with contracts and properties is a damn good thing - something far too many languages lack.
Contracts and properties are optional. If you don't want correctness guarantees then don't use them. On the other hand if you would like a little more insurance... well then they're very useful indeed.
Again, specification of units is optional. If you don't want to worry about units then don't use them. Then again if you're writing some physics code then having the sanity check of unit analysis to make sure everything is working properly is a damn useful thing to have available. Having dimensions and units as not more onerous than having types - it is simply another level of checking available; the benefit here is that the units are optional: if you don't want the extra checks, don't use them.
Well that depends on who you are really: Fortress looks incredibly readable to me. Then again I am a mathematician and look at math, formatted in exactly that way, all the time. If you spend all day looking at Java and C code then sure, it's going to look unfamiliar to you. Then again, you probably aren't in the target market for a language aimed specifically at scientific computing. To me a lot of C looks awful and can be hard to read because of its requirement that you pound everything into basic ASCII. It really all depends on what you're used to. As to how easy it is to enter - sure it would be nice if it was straight TeX - but then it is so similar that there is really no problem learning it. If you actually do a lot of math then you can name all those symbols straight away, and what you have to type in to get the symbol is simply it's name. Again, not ideal for people who don't do a lot of math, but then that isn't the target audience. If you do much math then the symbols look right instead of being the ugly ASCII kluges of other languages, and
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Fortress may be wonderful for the scientific part, but I do hope Sun finds a way to keep the GUI/OS-interaction code in some other language (Java is reasonable), making it possible to build applications from F
Re:From the specification, it is Ugly (Score:4, Informative)
And I think that's reasonable, given that the role that Fortress is intended to play is far more important (especially given that it is a niche role) than what Fortresses ancestor languages are. It owes as much to Scala (at least it looks that way - I have no idea whether Scala was actually an influence) as it does to Eiffel. What counts is what it is intended to be used for - which is scientific computing and HPC where parallelisation counts: that is to say the niche currently filled by Fortran.
I honestly have no idea what you mean here. I expect GUI/OS-interaction code would most likely look an awful lot like Scala, which is hardly a problem. The math formatting onlycomes in when actually doing mathematics. The rest of the time it's essentially just an OO language like any other, and won't look any different to any other language. Treating UI events will be straightforward.
There are a number of things that Fortress does to make parallelisation work. For instance for loops are parallel by default, as are vector operations. Try looking at the "atomic" keyword to see more on how control of serial and parallel operation is handled. If you want easy parallelisation via each method working in a separate thread and contracts determining wait conditions then look at Eiffel and SCOOP: it introduces a single new keyword (separate) and allows you to do just that.
I think what you need to consider is how many operator symbols are defined by default in Fortress: it actually isn't that many. Fortress simply supports unicode and the ability to define new operators using classical math symbols - it doesn't have them all defined in the base language. Almost everything is farmed out to libraries. You may think it looks ugly and complicated compared to Perl but I (who have done a fair bit of Perl programming, and have spent time looking at Fortress as it developed) think you're being premature. See it in action or actually try using it yourself and I think you'll quickly find it is, in fact, a lot more readable than Perl.
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Good News, but work is still needed (Score:4, Informative)
This announcement is great news because the parallel programming problem is quite difficult and is becoming more important as multi-core systems emerge. One important distinction that is often not made, is the difference between concurrency and parallel execution. (although the article does touch on it)
Basically, determining whether a program or algorithm is concurrent (parts can computed independently) is possible but can be difficult in some cases. Many people think that is the essence of parallel computing. It is not.
Once you have the concurrent parts, the questions becomes "whether they should be executed in parallel". The answer depends upon the ratio of computation to communication (parallel overhead). All parallel computers (and clusters) have different ratios and therefore, something that runs well in parallel on one machine, may run poorly on another.
Having a language where concurrency can be expressed and controlled, allows researchers to investigate the second issue (parallel scheduling).
If you want to read more about this kind of thing (and some other parallel programing ideas) take a look at some of the Cluster Programming [clustermonkey.net] articles on ClusterMonkey.
as opposed to pgfortran? (Score:3, Insightful)
INCONCEIVABLE (Score:2, Interesting)
-...You keep using that license. I do not think it means what you think it means [slashdot.org].
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Excellent reference!
Go read about it... (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, first go and read about it before making any comments or cracking FORTRAN jokes.
This language is unfortunately advertised as "FORTRAN replacement" though probably the only thing it shares with FORTRAN is that it is targetted at scientific computing. But that's about it!
Secondly, there is a different between language specification and implementation! The "interpreter" is just proof of concept and a fast way of giving means to people to play with it so that you can ot just try to express your computation in it, but also see it running in flesh! Though, it is primarily of interest to language designers to find out implementation quirks and iron them out as the language design evolves. A compiler is usually the final outcome, but is not the goal. The goal of language design is to address the problems in the domain it is targetted to, effectively.
I have been following the developments in Fortress community for a while and it is a very peculiar one in its own regard. Guy Steele has bettered himself again and has set some of the firsts-
1. Integration with typography system. The programs are not just typed, but typed well. You can typeset your equations. The primary symbol set is unicode (with ASCII symbols for lagacy compatibility).
2. Full support for closures, mixins etc with multi-paradigm programming support.
3. The language specification implies parallelism by default! loops are parallel, unless specified serial.
4. Units are included in the language type system. So the compiler can not just check whether you're using the right storage type (int, real etc), but also whether the calculation you're coding actually makes sense!
and many more. It is a great read for anyone remotely interested in computing, languages and software enginnering and development.
Please follow the links to the specification down in this thread and go through it, if your busy schedule permits.
Thanks
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That said, typing of variables is kind of interesting.
Alan.
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Re:Ambitious (Score:2)
C didn't fail... (Score:2)
A good substitute for FORTRAN is C. From the (very little) information one gets from the article, this Fortress will have ways for the programmer to select which loops will run serial and which will run in parallel. This could be done very easily with the current standard C, that's why #pragma exists.
I think people are rather overdoing this trend for creating new languages. I still have doubts whether it's better to use Perl or Python or R
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So you say, but it has still not superseded FORTRAN. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think there are still issues in C that prevent C code from being as heavily optimized as FORTRAN (pointer aliasing, perhaps?).
``I think people are rather overdoing this trend for creating new languages. I still have doubts whether it's better to use Perl or Python or Ruby or Lisp or PHP, each and every language has fans and detractors, each has advantages and disadvantages, depend
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never say never -- sooner or later we'll be able to hand write this stuff.