Re: one-liner for characater replacement

analyst41@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 25, 4:41 pm, "James Giles" <jamesgi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

analys...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

...


In order to determine where Fortran ought to go from here - do you
think the following strategic question needs to be asked and if so
what would be your answer?

As we speak now, is Fortran any longer a viable choice for software
developed and maintained by one organization intended to be sold to
others with customer service and other paraphernelia of commercial
software development?

In fact, I remember reading in this ng. that commercial Fortran
compilers themselves might no longer be viable.

If the answer (as I suspect it is) is that Fortran can only live on in
non-profit organizations, I think that should impact how the language
evolves in the future.

I can't see the relevance. Certainly existing software companies
believe that Fortran is a viable product. They still have reps on
the committee. They still sell compilers. But I don't see why
that should affect the features of the language. That's a matter
of usage, not where you got the implementation/

--
J. Giles



Given the incontrovertible fact that as of today Fortran represents
totally negligible revenues/profits to the Suns, IBMs etc. of the
world, whether they send representatives to meetings or not is
irrelevant. I strongly suspect that their aim is to maintain support
for a steadily dwindling pool of legacy applications.

Why can't the Fortarn community face facts and agree that Fortran's
future consists of flat files in - flatfiles out mathematically
intensive processing on a single machine with only primitive
prettification of output (if any)?

If we do, perhaps we'll stay away from endlessly cluttering the
language with features that are now universally handled by other
programming/scripting languages.

Hogwash, Fortran is a fine general purpose language and only getting better. I see it attracting more users not fewer as it finally acquires essential features that pulled users away in the first place. Given the need to remain backward compatible, it will never achieve true beauty, but at least you can now look it in the face without laughing.<snip>



--

Gary Scott
mailto:garylscott@sbcglobal dot net

Fortran Library: http://www.fortranlib.com

Support the Original G95 Project: http://www.g95.org
-OR-
Support the GNU GFortran Project: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/index.html

If you want to do the impossible, don't hire an expert because he knows it can't be done.

-- Henry Ford
.

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