It's anecdotal, or at least I've never seen the documentation of the performance of FORTRAN1 vs assembler; I suspect that it was on IBM platforms, for code fragments, when John Backus was still active.

On the other hand, it is, inarguably, more portable than assembler. I even have a good story about that ;-).

1  Also, it's no longer FORTRAN; this was changed in the Fortran 90 standard.

Information about American English usage here and here. Floating point issues? Please read this before posting. — emc

In reply to Re^3: Is Perl right for me? by swampyankee
in thread Is Perl right for me? by RobinV

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