Why Physicists Still Use Fortran

[jmh530]

On Sunday, 15 October 2017 at 22:09:21 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> http://moreisdifferent.com/2015/07/16/why-physicsts-still-use-fortran/
>
> Some good information there!

The article could have mentioned the restrict annotation in C. 
They mention the issue indirectly because Fortran programmers 
don't worry about pointers compared to C programmers. The crucial 
issue is that Fortran guarantees one variable can't alias another 
by default. There are compiler optimizations from ensuring this 
is the case. That's the reason restrict was created for C, so 
that it could make the same guarantee as Fortran.

The whole 0-based vs. 1-based is a small issue. If all your doing 
is matrix math, then 1-based is fine (esp. for a first language), 
but 0-based is better for a general purpose language.