A gentle critque..

[Paulo Herrera]

Walter Bright wrote:
> 
> Those are good parallels, and it's good you brought that up. Working C++ 
> legacy code is not going away and is not going to be translated to D. 
> What will happen is *new* code will be done in D.

Walter,
I guess you have good reasons to think in this way, but my experience is 
different.

I've been in two different graduate schools and at two different 
departments (Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences). I think the 
situation in those departments in different to what people observe in a 
CS department. In both places I met people that buy expensive Fortran 
compilers not only to compile old libraries, but to write new code. I 
know people that write large parallel codes in Fortran and that use a C 
library (PETSc) for the core numerical routines. Most of them are young 
researchers, so they learned Fortran few years ago. So, I don't think 
Fortran is still around because of old legacy code or "old legacy 
programmers".

I think most of that people use Fortran because there wasn't anything 
better for that kind of code. I think/hope D can be a viable alternative.

Paulo.