Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!bill From: bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Two Fortran Standards Message-ID: Date: 7 Sep 89 18:10:12 GMT References: : <1073@cernvax.UUCP> Sender: news@hcx1.UUCP Organization: Harris Computer Systems Division Lines: 40 In-reply-to: achille@cernvax.UUCP's message of 31 Aug 89 21:46:03 GMT > For what I've seen up to now, if you don't want F8x, just stick to F77 stmts > in F8x. I don't see any reason to have 2 stds. > I have now some clearer ideas (for the time being :-). I'll try to clarify why I believe this is insufficient. Let's say I have a customer bidding for a government contract to provide a flight simulator for the new F-1600 fighter jet, an improved version of the F-16. This customer already has an F-16 simulator, written in F77, running on a Whizbang-9000 machine. He is sure that a few minor mods are all that is required to build an F-1600 simulator to meet the contract. He's already gotten an exception from DoD to use FORTRAN instead of Ada (this does happen, by the way). Let us suppose that F8x is out, and F77 is no longer an active standard. Customer's first problem: he has to buy Whizbang's F8x compiler, because their F77 compiler no longer conforms to the FIPS for FORTRAN. After much haggling over price, he pays the bucks. Next problem: the F8x compiler doesn't give the same answers as the old F77 compiler did, even on the same hardware! He complains to Whizbang, who says, "Sorry, but the standard forced us to change that." Next problem: Whizbang has changed NAMELIST to conform to F8x, which is different from their F77 NAMELIST extension. Too bad, Whizbang says, the standard forced us to change. The list goes on... All of these problems can be avoided simply by retaining F77 as a separate standard. Whizbang can still implement F8x, and there will still be these incompatibilities, but F77 customers don't need to worry about them. Perhaps eventually this customer might convert his program to F8x, but meanwhile he has incurred a significant cost for something that should have been virtually free. Note that this customer didn't care about portability: only that the program behaves the same on the same hardware. Say all you want about these features not having guaranteed portability between revisions of the compiler -- Whizbang wouldn't change those things without a very good reason, because they don't want to make their customers mad. -- Bill Leonard Harris Computer Systems Division 2101 W. Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309 bill@ssd.harris.com or hcx1!bill@uunet.uu.net