This is just totally false. You can lay out your C arrays in exactly the same way that Fortran does, if you choose to. Or you can do something else, if that will give better performance. Tools are just tools; they don't determine what you can do with them. (I write matrix operations for a living, generally in C or Assembly; much of what I write is provably as fast as possible on the target hardware, so it could not possibly be faster if written in Fortran).