On 9/23/2009 11:13 AM, Paul Simonin wrote:
Hello R users,
I have a basic "computer programing" question. I am a student
currently taking a course that uses Fortran as the main programming
language, but the instructors are open to students using any language
they are familiar with. I have used R previously, and am wondering if
there is any benefit to my learning Fortran, or whether I should stick
with R for this class. Any advice? Are there clear benefits to using
Fortran, or things Fortran can do that R cannot?
They are very different languages. For many things Fortran will be much
faster than R: so much so that you might find R is too slow to use for
some of your assignments. On the other hand, R has much better support
for many high level things, so you will find it much easier to do some
of those: preparing graphs, etc.
My advice would be to use the class as an opportunity to learn Fortran.
Seeing things from more than one point of view is always a good thing.
This might not be relevant to this class, but it is possible to use
Fortran to write functions which are called from R: so you get the best
of both worlds. That's another reason to learn Fortran.
Duncan Murdoch
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