Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jerry From: jerry@violet.berkeley.edu ( Jerry Berkman ) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Two Fortran Standards Message-ID: <1989Sep13.001659.721@agate.berkeley.edu> Date: 13 Sep 89 00:16:59 GMT References: <:> <1073@cernvax.UUCP> <608@mbph.UUCP> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44) Reply-To: jerry@violet.berkeley.edu ( Jerry Berkman ) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 45 In article <608@mbph.UUCP> hybl@mbph.UUCP (Albert Hybl Dept of Biophysics SM) writes: > >I believe that the group of "implementor extensions" should be >empty! If there are to be extensions, they should be Official >sanctioned extensions that you and others on the X3J3 committee >have reviewed. ... > >---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Albert Hybl, PhD. Office UUCP: uunet!mimsy!mbph!hybl >Department of Biophysics Home UUCP: uunet!mimsy!mbph!hybl!ah >University of Maryland CoSy: ahybl >School of Medicine >Baltimore, MD 21201 Phone: (301) 328-7940 (Office) >---------------------------------------------------------------------- I assume from this that you think vendors supplying a "double complex" Type in Fortran 77 should be tarred and feathered! I am grateful for that extension on short word machines; I wish X3J3 had provided it. As it was, the initial implementations of double complex on different vendors systems used different names for the intrinsics. This was a minor mess, but better than no complex. Also, what about REAL*16 and INTEGER*2? There are some projects which could not function without those extensions. For that matter, I have been writting Fortran programs in lower case for 8-10 years, and don't feel any guilt about using that extension. I feel similarly about "z" format terms and "include" statements. On the Cray, my favorite timing tool is the "rtc()" intrinsic function; it is compiled into a single instruction which returns the time of day clock in machine cycles so that I can do very accurate timings of small loops. It's not portable, but I don't care. I would however, like a portable cpu time used subroutine or function. Fortran 8x does not include such a function in it's vast set of intrinsics; even though every system I use has such a function (I know there are probably some that don't; add it anyway to the standard and let them return zero all the time). My point is that there have been many useful extensions to the standard, and that there will continue to be useful extensions. We can't freeze Fortran. - Jerry Berkman, U.C. Berkeley