Re: Computational scientists ignoring and ignored by Ada

[agate!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!s ol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.kei.com!ub!netfs!news@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (DON BERRYM]

In <CCKyu8.KtD@world.std.com> srctran@world.std.com writes:
> 
>     One area that Ada has had no luck in penetrating (or more particularly,
> one area where the Ada community has had no interest in penetrating), is
> that of the Computational Science community, which until quite recently was

Well we are attempting to use Ada for just this. So Ada is not being totally
ignored. I think the biggest problem is that Computational Computing is 
often done by Scientist who are not Programmers and self taught themselves
FORTRAN back when there were card punches. Unfortunately Ada is not easy
for them to learn, and they almost have no desire to learn whats not directly
needed for them to do their job, Science not Programming. If I could only
get them to write good FORTRAN code I'd be happy.

The other problem is that SOME Ada compilers do not generate Numerical
code as good as FORTRAN. For example from one Ada compiler the code
takes 1.5 times longer than FORTRAN, and with another compule 3 TIMES longer.
This gives Ada a bad name. I get around this by coding the main structure 
of the program in Ada and the Number Crunching Loops in FORTRAN. Its not 
what I'd like to do but it gives me the performance I need.


Don Berryman
Defence Research Establishment Pacific
Canadian Forces Base Esquimalt
Victoria, BC, CANADA, V0S-1B0
604-363-2731    604-363-2856fax
berryman@orca.drep.dnd.ca