FORTRAN or MATLAB

Greetings;
     I think there are two issues here, and they should be kept separated.
One is, "What language do I use for research?" and the other is "What
language do I use for teaching?'. My experience is that most B.S. and M.S.
students are poor programmers in any language, and very few have the
intellectual stamina to do anything in computational electromagnetics.
Therefore, I teach them by having them use MATLAB, since it is the easiest
vehicle in which vector-matrix representation is explicit. I would not
convert a research tool to MATLAB, whatever language it's written in.

Douglas B. Miron
EE Dept.
South Dakota State University
mirond_at_mg.sdstate.edu
Received on Thu May 02 1996 - 20:30:00 EDT