(Please don’t lob rocks at me. I love Python.)

  • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    I’ve never played with FORTRAN, but I’ve done some linear algebra with matlab. Matlab was interesting for the native handling if matrices. What makes FORTRAN so good at linear algebra?

    • mkwt@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Matlab’s syntax for matrices actually derives from Fortran. There’s a lot of flexibility in Fortran’s array features for

      • multidimensional arrays
      • arrays of indeterminate and flexible length
      • vectorized operations on arrays without explicitly writing loops.

      Because Fortran does not have a pointer in the sense of C, the Fortran compiler is free to make several optimization that a C compiler can’t. Compiled Fortran is often faster than C code that does the same thing.