Re: J3's workings

Steve Lionel wrote:

<snip>

We do hear a lot from our customers, but I'd go along with what Bob
says. Vendors have no special influence at the standards level and it
seems to me that some on the committee like inventing new language
(especially if it resembles C++) and have little stomach for working
out the issues with and refining the existing language.

As I hear it, the vendor representatives do try their best to make
known their customers' desires - but it rarely helps.

Question for Steve Lionel (Intel) and Robert Corbett (SUN): what are
the most commonly requested features that are not in Fortran 2003 or
the F2008 draft?

As standards of a programming language evolve, the features added
become less obviously necessary, since otherwise they would have been
added previously. Maybe after Fortran 2003, the language should evolve
by having compiler writers, both commercial and volunteer, (gfortran
and g95) add extensions that they think are important based on user
requests. If those features are adopted by several compilers, they
could later be standardized. Compiler-specific extensions do have
downsides, but they may not be worse than having a language standard
that gets too far ahead of compiler writers and users.

.

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