fortran95 or c for a new stellar evolution program?

[Bill Paxton]

Hi All (again),

Thanks for the many comments and strongly expressed opinions!  It's  
interesting that my preference, c, got essentially no support, while  
both f95 and c++ got ringing endorsements in roughly equal numbers.    
I'm going to need to do some work exploring Frank's suggestions about  
combining parts written in different languages -- perhaps if we limit  
ourselves to linux & Mac we can work out something.   It would  
certainly be nice to have a world in which the different physics  
packages were actually plug-in's with clean enough interfaces so that  
it didn't matter how they were implemented.  For example, I'd like to  
be able to plug in a different convection package, say, to replace  
the default one -- I should be able to pick whichever language I want  
to write the actual code.  If the interfaces are designed right, the  
overhead of wrappers for going between languages shouldn't be a big  
problem.

Perhaps Piet has the right idea -- use a high level interpreted  
language as glue to put together packages that are written in various  
languages such as Frank mentioned.  Hmmm.... I haven't written a big  
system in Lisp since back in the 70's -- how would you like lots of  
lambda's?  ; - )   Don't worry; I'm just kidding...  But I have had  
good luck recently using Ruby with c extensions.  I guess that's  
another thing for me to check -- can Ruby deal with fortran packages  
in a reasonable manner?  (And please do NOT start sending me messages  
about how I should be using Python instead!)

Frank will be visiting KITP for a few weeks in January, and I hope  
that he and I will have a chance to work on some of these issues  
while he's here.  And if any of the rest of you have thoughts about  
your ideal stellar evolution testbed, please share!

Thanks again.

To be continued....

Bill