Fortran has an interesting (and somewhat unusual) construct known as "arithmetic if". It looks something like this: IF (arithmetic expression) label1, label2, label3 If the arithmetic expression evaluates to less than zero, control jumps to label1...

I was thinking the other day about certain computationally intensive numerical problems, particularly matrix multiplication, finding the eigenvalues of a matrix, and the Fast Fourier Transform, and how choosing the right algorithm depends on such intricasies...

I want to step back and look at some more specific features. One feature that can be highly controversial in language design (and the evolution of existing languages) is operator overloading. Some languages have no operator overloading and a fairly limited...