Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!pur-ee!hankd From: hankd@pur-ee.UUCP (Hank Dietz) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Two Fortran Standards Message-ID: <12687@pur-ee.UUCP> Date: 25 Aug 89 21:45:43 GMT References: <282@unmvax.unm.edu> <303@unmvax.unm.edu> Reply-To: hankd@pur-ee.UUCP (Hank Dietz) Organization: Purdue University Engineering Computer Network Lines: 34 In article <303@unmvax.unm.edu> brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd) writes: >we all used to die at age 30. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I'm 29, so I guess I better voice my disapproval of 8X right now! ;-) >F77 is being retained as a subset of F8x; this provides both the >protection and the progress. Did I miss someone talking about a Fortran subset standard? I'd be perfectly happy if they kept Fortran 77 active as the subset dialect standard. ;-) I've talked to many folk about the standard, and the comments fall into four catagories: [1] No comment (usually, "I'm afraid to do anything because I don't want to risk offending any of our customers"). [2] I hate the 8x standard and will not use it (usually, "I've always used 66/77, and I'm not gonna rewrite the code nor retrain the programmers" but also folks like me saying "it clearly is a different language and to call it Fortran is dishonest"). [3] I like the standard because I believe it will finally kill Fortran. (Usually, "I want to see us using Ada/Modula2/C++ and all Fortran used to have going for it was that it was consistently implemented *EVERYWHERE*.) [4] I like the standard because we really needed the array extensions, although some of that other stuff.... (Heard only from X3J3 members in favor of 8x....) Most people seem to be [1] or [2]. Have others gotten similar feedback? -hankd@ecn.purdue.edu