I disagree.... where are the equivalent high quality field proven
mathematical
subroutine libraries?

Sorry, but IMSL, LAPACK, BLAS, ... (to name a few) all are equally well
usable from Fortran, C, or C++. A given vendor usually writes these
underlying bits by hand from assembler anyway to get maximum performance.
It then makes no difference what language you use at the high level.
Maybe 20 years ago Fortran compilers in general produced faster code
than C compilers, but not today.

Speaking as a computational physicist who programs many large-scale
numerical simulations, I usually use C. C is often much better from a data
manipulation standpoint. Try implementing a doubly-linked list
in Fortran. Yes, such things can be useful in numerical algorithms.

I'm glad there's a readable version of NEC in C available now, this
will make interfacing it with a gui much easier. NEC for typical
amateur antennas runs so fast on todays processors, the important
thing is easily visualizing the input and output.

I'm curious what free Fortran 90/95 compiler you refer to? "evaluation
versions" that expire after xx days don't count

Torsten
N4OGW