Fortran Features

A lot of people have ideas for Fortran features, judging by the
numerous vendor extensions, most of which never become part of the
standard. I assume that some reluctance to add features is to avoid
feature bloat. In any case, here are a few I would like.

Fortran has moved towards making user functions and subroutines have
more features of interinsic procedures. Along those lines, why not make
the CALL keyword optional for any subroutine that has been prototyped
with an INTERFACE?

How about supporting local-scope variables, like inside of DO/IF/etc.
blocks?

Text named line labels would be nice, even though modern code minimizes
the use of line labels.

It would be nice to allow mixing of functions and subroutines in the
same generic type name. This is more useful with derived types, where
the unique areument type keeps things distinct.

Some user-defined type functions would be a lot easier to implement
with user-defined type coersion rules. For example, ISO_VARYING_STRING
implementations, would be much simpler for mixing CHAR and
VARYING_STRING procedures if you could define rules for converting
arguments among those types.

Lastly, does it help to post such ideas to comp.lang.fortran, or does
one need to be on a Fortran committee to have any influence on the
language?

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: OT: FORTRAN
    ... needed to support a more standard version of Fortran -- and at that, ... CDC always supported all ANSI Fortran features. ... They frequently added additional features and a lot of them became standard features in the next version of the ANSI standard; ... We always ran the ANSI standard Fortran tests everytime we made an update, even a bug fix, to the Fortran compiler. ...
    (comp.lang.pl1)
  • Re: one-liner for characater replacement
    ... acquires essential features that pulled users away in the first ... who abandoned Fortran have no interest in ever coming back. ... ticket items such as the stilted "me too" imitations of fads like OOP ... be generic programming. ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: A petition to J3 apropos FORTRANs future
    ... > Those features that individually were not decisive before ... > As long as non-programmer managers can mandate language ... FORTRAN has always been the ugly duckling once the ... Commercial users needed "dirty" things like database APIs, ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: Format question
    ... The Fortran 90 features that are not contained in this ... > describes the nature of the obsolescent features. ... For nested DO loops with only one statement in the loop, ...
    (comp.lang.fortran)
  • Re: PL/I for Itanium
    ... (snip on Fortran and PL/I) ... That, too, but there are a lot of PL/I features that ... with such dynamic features) work, but in general one should avoid ... MAP the string to get the performance. ...
    (comp.os.vms)