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Talk:Multi-dimensional array: Difference between revisions
→Column-major order in Fortran
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I removed something a bit silly in the page. It should probably be discussed here before attempting to give a personal opinion.
First, it's silly to compare Fortran to Algol and wonder why Fortran does not follow the Algol convention: Fortran ''predates'' Algol by several years[1]. It's also silly to mention that MATMUL follow this "convention". It has nothing to do with that. MATMUL multiplies matrices, period. Matrices are stored in column-major order, but they could be stored in any way (diagonal order, or any fancy order), that would not change MATMUL's "interpretation": a matrix is a matrix.
There was apparently a misconception in the comment: one must not confuse array ''storage'' order with array indexing. Maybe the use of some programming languages has given the author of this comment the habit to ''think'' that arrays are naturally stored in row-major order, but this is indeed a convention. Some languages follow another convention. Some libraries use still other storage mechanisms to save place (for sparse arrays, triangular arrays, band arrays...). Still, array indexing will probably always be done like in mathematics, that is, A(i,j) is element at row i and column j, whatever the storage peculiarities may be.
[1] In the very first [http://www.eah-jena.de/~kleine/history/languages/FortranAutomaticCodingSystemForTheIBM704.pdf Fortran manual], dated october 1956, one can see the array storage was already column-major. See page 11. However, one can also read that array were always stored backwards: yet another convention, surprise surprise.
[[User:Arbautjc|Arbautjc]] ([[User talk:Arbautjc|talk]]) 07:15, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
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