Hi, I am one of those old grey-haired Professors who spent years since 1963
using variants of FORTRAN with time out for four years of enforced Burroughs
ALGOL and then back to FORTRAN. In Chemistry education there is an added
problem of students who want to avoid mathematics. I taught Physical Chemistry
Laboratory for some 30 years and found BASIC/GWBASIC is a way to introduce
students to sequential coding that could lead to later use of other languages
such as f77, C++ or PASCAL. In a lab course it is easy to write some special
purpose program in GWBASIC for a given lab report and the concept of
programming takes second place to the formulas used; often such programs are
less than a single page. In my area of Quantum Chemistry there are a few folks
pushing C++, but I would estimate that 95% of most huge programs such as GAMESS
or GAUSSIAN are in some form of FORTRAN. Personaly I want to "think" in
formulas not in pointers and the pointers just add another layer of complexity
to what is probably already complicated mathematics. After all that is where
the acronynym came from: "Formula Translation". The idea is to think in math
terms and let the compiler translate the formulas to machine code. Another
factor is the ability to just create variables as desired without all the
declarations required in PASCAL and ALGOL. Finally, for a long, long time the
machine code produced by various fortran compilers was testably faster and
PASCAL would be a counter example of lucid slowness! As far as a text, I never
used one, I am coasting along on a two week course in FORTRAN II in 1963 and
along the way just looking at published routines and learning what works and
what does not. For learning I would still suggest BASIC/GWBASIC.
Don Shillady
Emeritus Professor of Chemistry, VCU
Ashland VA (working at home)> Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:26:08 -0800> From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Teaching
Scientific Computation (looking for the perfect text)> CC: Beowulf@beowulf.org>
> X-Frumious: Bandersnatch> > On Tue, Nov 20, 2007 at 09:46:41PM +0100, Vincent
Diepeveen wrote:> > There is several ways to look at this issue.> > Suppose
your students totally fail as physics student and even more > > as future
manager/teamleader and continue as computer science students.> > > > Then what
language can they use best?> > ... then they'll be studying many languages, and
it won't be any big> deal that they studied Fortran, Python, and Mathematica in
their first> course.> > It's dumb to act as if these students are never
learning another> language.> > -- greg> >
_______________________________________________> Beowulf mailing list,
Beowulf@beowulf.org> To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe)
visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
