Re: Fortran 77 parser

In article <teednfW0Euj8cmXanZ2dnUVZ_vGinZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Walter Spector <w6ws_xthisoutx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ron Shepard wrote:
... Cray
*WANTED* you to just use REAL declarations for 64-bit floating point
because that would make it harder for you to move your code
elsewhere (VAX minicomputers, etc.).

The Cray machines were built with 64-bit floating point in mind.
There was no built-in hardware to address or process 32-bit data.
So it was 'natural' to make REAL 64 bits wide.

Yes, I agree, but that was not my point. For example, Cray
compilers also supported a few dozen oddball intrinsic functions
that no other vendor supported. The more your code relied on those
intrinsic functions, the more your code was locked in to using Cray
compilers and Cray hardware. Cray wanted you to use REAL
declarations, in part, for the same reason, it helped to lock you in
to their business model. Other vendors in the late 70's and 80's
did this too, of course, with language features and library
routines, it was standard practice.


It was this vendor attitude,
and the influence they had over the ANSI standards committee, that
prevented any updates to f77 during the decade of the 1980's.

False. Cray was actually a big proponent of F90. You must be
thinking of another "supercomputer" company whose name also began
with the letter "C".

Yes, I have stacks of transparencies 2 or 3 inches high from both
DEC and CONVEX from about 1987 where they were preaching the evils
of the proposed f8x. I don't remember Cray doing that, and while
other vendors did this too to some extent, CONVEX and DEC were the
loudest. By that time, they had already managed to delay ANSI
approval by 3 or 4 years, and they would continue to be successful
for another 3 or 4 years after that. It is very clear from this
material, which I think was presented to all of their major
customers during that time, that their opposition was based
primarily on business and marketing reasons, not because the users
of their hardware or compilers were benefiting from their delaying
tactics.

And we still to this day do not really have a standard preprocessor
in common use, something else that has been essential to writing
efficient portable code since the 1970's. Yes, the C preprocessor
syntax is a de facto standard, but it is never going to be
standardized by the ANSI committee.

There is always COCO... Dan Nagles extended version (which
has some additional text substitution capabilities) works
rather well.

I don't think COCO is supported by a single fortran vendor that I
use right now. On the other hand, the C preprocessor is supported
by every vendor that I know of. That's why I called it a "de facto"
standard. However, there is no chance that this de facto standard
is going to be approved and standardized (there are differences from
vendor to vendor) even though it has been used for the past 25 years
by everyone.

$.02 -Ron Shepard
.