Recently there has been considerable debate within the scientific computation community over the suitability of C++ for large scale numerical computation. This note reports on timing studies of Fortran 77 and C++ conducted on the Intel IPSC/3 Hypercube, the IBM RS-6000 and the Sun Sparc Station 2. Timings are presented for two fundamental algorithms including a dense vector inner product and multiplication of a dense vector by a sparse matrix. Comparison to hand coded assembler routines is also provided in selected cases. The results demonstrate that C and C++ can be just as efficient as FORTRAN and therefore deserve serious consideration.