Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!deimos.cis.ksu.edu!unmvax!brainerd
From: brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Miscellaneous Answers, Observations, etc.
Message-ID: <318@unmvax.unm.edu>
Date: 2 Sep 89 00:24:04 GMT
References: <1651@convex.UUCP>
Organization: University of New Mexico at Albuquerque
Lines: 37

In article <1651@convex.UUCP>, psmith@mozart.uucp (Presley Smith) writes:
>     -  Many things have been voted on in the X3J3 committee with "text to be
>        supplied later..."  or "person x knows what to change".  I know of NO
>        other committee that operates that way.   Every other committee that
>        I've been a member of has operated ONLY on proposed changes with line
>        numbers and text for a particular document.

We used to do this many years ago, but in recent years it has been policy
to have a written proposal for every comma changed.  Maybe this policy has
been violated, but I can't remember it.

>        One example of the problem of getting the Fortran 8x document 
>        correct has been on this net.  The issue of removal of "with the
>        same interpretation" in TWO places in the document WAS DEFINED
>        in a DOCUMENT voted on by the committee which contained BOTH
>        PAGE and LINE NUMBERS to be changed for BOTH places in the 
>        8x draft, COMPLETE with the TEXT to be SUBSTITUTED in each case. 
>        Due to human error or whatever, it was only changed in one 
>        place.  This seems like a trivial error.  How many more serious
>        errors are there?   
> 
So even the suggested and followed method does not produce perfect results,
as I suspect is the case in all other human endeavors.  What is the point
that you are trying to make?

> 
>   2, The second point is that there's too much protest over keeping 
>      keeping  FORTRAN 77 as an active standard.

If this is what you really want, what is wrong with having F77 be a subset
of F8x, both recognized standards and described in X3.9-19??.

-- 
Walt Brainerd  Unicomp, Inc.           brainerd@unmvax.cs.unm.edu
               2002 Quail Run Dr. NE
               Albuquerque, NM 87122
               505/275-0800