Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!sun-barr!newstop!sun!road!khb From: khb@road.Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Advanced Languages - Floating Point Group ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Two Fortran Standards Message-ID: <124377@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 8 Sep 89 22:47:37 GMT References: <:> <1073@cernvax.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - Advanced Languages - Floating Point Group ) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 33 In article bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) writes: > >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. What constitues good reason is highly variable. In former incarnations I have been bitten by most vendors, two of which are: 1) IBM (fortran G->H-VS fortran) all had some wonky differences 2) Cray cft114 -> cft77 These are the ones which come to mind first ... actually I can't recall any vendor who didn't screw me up on extensions at one time or another (if I used their computers long enough ... :>) ... usually it wasn't too major, and I learned how to write portable code ... :> Holding up standards activitity to protect those who wrote non-portable code, and whose vendors won't maintain the old features, and who don't want to cope seems to me as a user to be quite outrageous. (As a vendor I can see that _any_ change means folks might wander off to new platforms ... but that doesn't seem to be a good reason to freeze standards either ... standards exist to serve users & vendors ... so the good of the greatest number should be considered). Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. !! kbierman@sun.com It's Not My Fault | MTS --Only my work belongs to Sun* I Voted for Bill & | Advanced Languages/Floating Point Group Opus | "When the going gets Weird .. the Weird turn PRO"