fortran95 or c for a new stellar evolution program?

[Stephen Justham]

Hello everyone,

Thanks for all your thoughts over the weekend.

Though I much prefer F95 as a language to C, I'm afraid neither of the 
free F95 compilers seem very efficient yet, and -- as already noted -- C 
seems more likely to be cross-platform portable. On the other hand, free 
compilers may be good enough for development, with institutions buying 
commercial compilers where speed is required ... and I have a bias that 
the best Fortran compilers lead to faster numerical code than in C.

In further defence of F95, one of the arguments raised against it was that 
there were too many different ways to program badly using it -- I suspect 
that can only be an issue in a multi-programmer project where everyone is 
following their own quick-and-messy preference. If Bill is going to be in 
control, the finished work will not suffer from lazy coding, and in that 
case the clarity of F95 makes for elegant code.

Beyond that though, I'd be happy with either result: the biggest 
unresolved problem with stellar evolution codes is still stability, and 
improving that situation is far more important than the language chosen.

Thanks again,

Stephen