Re: Programming skills required by mathematicians?

aruzinsky wrote:

> On Jul 2, 2:35 am, Han de Bruijn <Han.deBru...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 
>>aruzinsky wrote:
>>
>>>If you were an "applied mathematician," I would recommend Fortran and
>>>Algol only because there are many legacy programs written in these
>>>languages.  In particular, the Collected Algorithms from ACM Vol I to
>>>III are mostly in Algol and Fortran.
>>
>>Algol ? I thought _that_ is outdated ! And Fortran ? Indeed there are
>>many programs written in that language. It has even been my mother's
>>tongue. But I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. My favorite is Pascal.
> 
> Algol is outdated, but many of the 1950s algorithms written in Algol
> are not.  If you know some Pascal, you can probably read Algol well
> enough to translate.  I bet there are plenty of Algol algorithms in
> Collected Algorithms from ACM that are better than their counterparts
> published in Numerical Recipes in C (or Fortran).

If you mean it _this_ way, I can nothing but agree.

Han de Bruijn