base conversion performance

[David Hough]

> But none of the problems we
> have discussed outweigh performance until most Cray-class customers
> tell me they do.

Actually I don't know of any realistic applications in which the time
to print out the answers is comparable to the time to compute them,
although I have heard that this is still true in beginning Fortran
computer programming courses in engineering schools.

I have seen a couple of customer complaints that mostly have to do
with using formatted Fortran I/O to move data "portably" among
applications running on different systems whose unformatted data
was incompatible.   The complaint was that the I/O was slower
(in SunOS 4.0) than it used to be (in SunOS 3.5).  The complaint
was not that the base conversion was slowing down the overall
application considerably, however.