Portability and Reusability, Standardized Programming for Present and Future Computers
JEAN-JACQUES DUMONT, Marco Tomassini · International Journal of Modern Physics C · 1991
Unstructured sequential programming in Fortran, together with a top down approach for problem analysis, have always been and still are the usual physicists favorite methods as far as computing is concerned. This unfortunate fact of life is causing a tremendous amount of efficiency loss for code development and maintenance, which could easily be avoided by evolving to a more modern, bottom up programming style, based on the new emerging standards (system interfaces, communication between computational nodes, object-oriented C-extensions, user graphical interfaces, data structures etc.). We are reaching the historical point where this evolution becomes mandatory if one wants to tackle properly the problem of programming in a reasonably efficient way the highly parallel machines which are now appearing on the market, to the delight of numerous scientists who are badly in need of more computation power.