This is much of the text of a report which I posted a short time ago to several Internet Newsgroups including sci.geo.earthquakes.

The information in this report represents expressions of personal opinion.

This report represents a preliminary attempt to determine what the best computer programming language might be for the development of a particular type of earthquake forecasting computer program.

The object here is to get some informal opinions from other people. I will then try to evaluate what appear to be the strengths and weaknesses of the different computer programming languages.

This proposed earthquake forecasting computer program will be a more advanced version of one which I already have running. But it will hopefully produce much higher quality data and be easier to use. It is unlikely that I myself would create the original version of the proposed program. Once it was running it would probably be made available for free to governments, research institutions, and professional and amateur researchers around the world. They could then gradually add routines to it in order to improve its performance.

Here is what it would need to do:

*** Generate data such as the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky and the locations of ocean and Solid Earth Tide crests and troughs around the world at various times. Programs which generate those types of data already exist. But they need to be merged into a single program. To generate those types of data this proposed computer program would need to run at a fairly good speed.

*** Be able to run on home computers which have a minimum of 100 megahertz speed processor chips and perhaps 5 gigabyte hard drives. Most modern home computers run at least that fast and have that type of data storage capacity.

*** Be written in a programming language which would be available to most people either for free or for some reasonable cost.

*** Be written in a language which people who can do at least some computer programming could learn fairly easily. Some version of BASIC might be ideal.

*** Be written in a language which people could use to develop routines in a modular form so that new data generation or processing routines could be easily developed and added to or deleted from the program.