| Once augmented with a pointer system, it is really hard to beat for clarity and ease of use. It also does everything a scientist needs. Some groups (all the major ones at the lab) switched to C++ and absolutely killed productivity across their entire experiments. Such a painful move. But people claim it's the way of the future, so WTF. C++ is object oriented as opposed to being a procedurally based language (like Fortran). The argument for its use is widely varied, but most posit that the level of abstraction is greater, and it's easier to understand and manipulate "organic" objects rather than huge walls of procedural code. That being said, when your labs changed languages the format was new and if you had Fortran programmers now doing C++ they probably were not familiar with the proper C++ optimization techniques, most likely because they didn't exist yet. There is nothing uglier than C++ code written by a Fortran programmer with no theory training on object oriented design. I'm still not sure why I typed all that, and you probably already know all of it. I just like talking about programming. WTF? And if you want a job outside science, you gotta know something other than Fortran.
Recursively Yours,
Kenny...
PETZ Member #5
SteamyZ. Never had did me wrong. - SL103 07/06/04 11:58:15
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