Re: A petition to J3 apropos FORTRAN's future

From: Ron Shepard (ron-shepard_at_NOSPAM.comcast.net)
Date: 03/23/04

  • Next message: Theodore W. Hall: "Re: Help, "old style" code compilation." 
    Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 00:20:23 -0600

    In article <slrnc5um10.6se.mbkennelSPAMBEGONE@lyapunov.ucsd.edu>,
     Dr Chaos <mbkennelSPAMBEGONE@NOSPAMyahoo.com> wrote:

    > Why wasn't there Fortran 80 giving all those features?

    At that time the standards committee was dominated by vendors, not
    by programmers. The vendors did not want the language improved for
    various reasons. Most of those vendors are now out of business.
    One of them, Digital Equipment Corporation, went in my mind from one
    of the best companies to support scientific programming to one of
    the worst offenders. However, within the decade they went out of
    business. Convex was another company that was highly critical of
    improving the fortran language in the 80's.

    What *SHOULD* have happened was that there should have been a series
    of minor improvements, every 2 to 4 years, during the 80's. F80
    should have been F77 plus the MIL-STD extensions. Then there should
    have been ALLOCATE() and array syntax a couple of years later. I'd
    guess that a standard preprocessor could have been agreed upon
    during that time too if programmers had been in control of the
    committee. I don't think the language that would have resulted in
    1990 would have been that much different from what actually
    resulted, but fortran would not have lost a whole decade of new
    programmers during that time.

    Remember, F90 was an international ISO standard *BEFORE* it was a US
    standard. That was because the vendors on the committee were still
    dragging their feet, even in 1990.

    $.02 -Ron Shepard

  • Next message: Theodore W. Hall: "Re: Help, "old style" code compilation."

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