Should i take fortran or c

Why would it generate more efficient assembly than passing pointers around? C90 workarounds are terrible. Fortunately, C99 rescues us:. Complex arithmetic C99 introduced a complex data type. I wonder how it compares. Array index ranges other than [ N-1] I hate this limitation of C. Take your career to the next level.

Click this affiliate link to register for the Data Science Masters Program. It also does not have a garbage collector; it has a lot of permissiveness in types, etc. Actually, C is one step above Assembler.

That is good and bad. Good because you can do whatever you want if you have enough skill. Bad, because you can do whatever you want, and if you do not have enough talent, you will crash with the whole team. Fortran excels at processing the array. If your problem can be described in terms of simple data structures and, in particular, matrices, Fortran is well suited.

Fortran programmers end up using arrays even in non-obvious cases for example, for graphing. Assuming, of course, that your problem is suitable for Fortran. I recommend anyone who enters computer science to start with a high-level dynamic language, like Python. Always remember that your time is more valuable than your CPU time! There are many differences apart from this, but since you asked for the main difference, here is the orientation of the design.

Fortran is considered the first high-level language, and its developers wanted it to be. This can be seen in the syntax differences between the two languages. Fortran is more natural for humans to use more words. If you want to be a master in programming, then the first key is to get started with any language.

Language does not matter at all, but the thing which is really mattering is that how much time you are spending on that programming language which you are learning. Here are some of the most important tips which will help you to follow them after choosing your language. Get started. Do not feel bad that you are not an expert programmer yet.

You can take as long as you want or move as fast as you can. Now you just have to give time, and your skills will become best. Computers are still largely magic even to me. It will take me a long time to figure out that it has something to do with it. But if you stick with it and can not go on, sometimes almost everything will not work. It will come, trust me.

Remember, every great and best programmer at one time had NO IDEA what he is assembly was, or compiler, or pointer, or class, or closure, or transistor, etc. Treat yourself. Build things you think are cool. Build stuff you want to use.

Write English. Code is likely as English than like mathematics. In Great code is easy to read. In great code functions, files, classes, and variables are also named very well. On the other hand, C has been the main systems programming language for a long time. You therefore have access to many more general purpose libraries. There is also no lack of scientific computing libraries for C. I think that both languages do a great job of being backwards compatible.

Sidebar Home. About me. Table of Contents C vs Fortran for scientific computing. Inlining of code I guess that for most Fortran compilers, the code has to be in the same source file, whereas in C you would typically put such code in header files.

Efficiency of different types of array arguments relevant for Fortran, see for example this excellent guide by Intel. Problem dependence: Fortran excels at array processing. If your problem can be described in terms of simple data structures and in particular arrays, Fortran is well adapted. Fortran programmers end up using arrays even in non-obvious cases e. Assuming, of course, that your problem is suited to Fortran. I'd recommend to anyone going into computational science to start with a dynamic high-level language such as Python.

Always remember that your time is more valuable than CPU time! Fortran is a domain specific language. I use Python and Cython a lot too.

I'm also throwing my two cents in kind of late, but I've only just seen this thread and I feel that, for posterity, there are a few points that desperately need to be made. Well, otherwise it's apples and oranges to compare a full-fledged dynamically typed object-oriented language with something as static as Fortran. Yes, some modern implementations of the latest Fortran standards can do more than just that, but very few people actually use them, and so when we speak of Fortran, we think simple, static, and imperative language.

If you write, semantically, the same code in Fortran or in C, the compiler will, in both cases, produce the same assembly which will run just as fast. This now leads to my second point: why do we still see differences? The problem is that most comparisons are made by Fortran programmers trying something in C or vice-versa. Ever notice how most authors or poets prefer to write in their native languages? Would you want to write poetry in a language in which you don't feel completely confident or at home?

Of course not I myself consider C to be my "native" programming language. I did, however, also spend three years working in a group that used only Fortran, in which I have achieved a certain level of fluency. I would, however, never write anything on my own in Fortran since I'm more comfortable with C and, as a consequence, the resulting code will be better , whatever you define that as. So the main difference is in the programmer, not the language.

So there are no differences? Well, not quite. Here are a few examples:. Good luck. In C you generally have intrinsic functions for each architecture, or, more recently, general SIMD vector types in gcc. Most Fortran compilers will only use SIMD instructions to unroll loops, but if you have a kernel which works on short vectors of data in a non-obvious way, the compiler will very probably not see it.

Same goes for OpenCL, for which the best I could find is a recent project which only supports a few basic calls. However, if you want real control of your threads, i. In C you have the standard pthreads which, while not warm and fuzzy, will still get you through the storm.

In general, most computations that rely on access to the operating system, e. Oh, and don't try to do your own networking with Fortran. Ease of use: Fortran is closer to Matlab than C is. Once you've gotten over all the different keywords and how to declare variables, the rest of the code looks like Matlab, making it more accessible to users with limited programming experience.

Interoperability: When you create a struct in C, the layout of the actual data is straight-forward and deterministic. In Fortran, if you use pointer arrays or structured data, the actual layout of the data is strongly compiler-dependent, not straight-forward, and usually completely undocumented.

You can call C from Fortran and vice-versa, but don't start thinking it may be as easy to pass anything more than a static array from one to the other and back. This is all somewhat geeky, low-level stuff, but this is High-Performance Computing we're talking about, right?

If you're not interested in how to best exploit the underlying hardware paradigms, i. This has gotten much longer that anything I entended, so here's a summary -- a set of take home messages of sorts:. Given that for almost all of us the most valuable thing is our own time, the conclusion is this: use the language that allows you to develop, debug and test your code the fastest, within reason ignoring that it may be slower than maybe possible if you wrote it in Fortran. Clearly the abstraction level can be raised much higher by avoiding raw pointers and switching to opaque classes, but it is a nice first step.

With all of that said, I think that the undoing of scientific packages written in low-level languages and Fortran is the reluctance to expose convenient interfaces for sophisticated data structures: most people are satisfied with the Fortran BLAS interface, as it only requires pointers and leading dimensions to describe matrices, but few people would argue that the usual integer Fortran sparse-direct solver interface is anything close to convenient cf.

In summary, I argue for using assembly for low-level computational kernels, but higher level languages for everything else, especially when operating on non-trivial data structures.

Since I am new here, I was looking through old questions and found this one. Hopefully it's not taboo to answer old ones! Since no one else has mentioned this, figured I would. Fortran is almost fully supported by most of the major compilers intel, ibm, cray, NAG, PCG even gcc with the soon-to-be newest release 4.