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: 13 Sep 89 19:11:13 GMT References: : <1073@cernvax.UUCP> <608@mbph.UUCP> Sender: news@hcx1.UUCP Organization: Harris Computer Systems Division Lines: 91 In-reply-to: hybl@mbph.UUCP's message of 12 Sep 89 11:42:25 GMT Dr. Hybl seems to have badly misunderstood my posting, so I'd like to clarify several things. First, let me say that my example was hypothetical, but not unrealistic. These kinds of bids are submitted routinely. > Hmm, can we conclude that for this application that either (1) FORTRAN > is better; or (2) the Government doesn't care about portability; > or (3) Reagan trickle-down theory is at work. None of the above. The customer is bidding based on his assumption that the Government cares about cost, and he thinks that making minor modifications to an existing program is much more cost-effective than developing from scratch using Ada. Most of the exceptions granted by DoD that I know about are based on the existence of something "close" to what the contract calls for. In my example, this previously-existing program was also developed for the Government, so apparently _it_ was portable enough for the Government. > Bill, please provide a 10-20 page explanation of why the government > no longer considers FORTRAN an acceptable computer language. I can't provide an explanation of something I don't believe is true. The Government still does an awful lot of work in FORTRAN; only the DoD is under any mandate to use Ada, and even they give exceptions. Yes, it is true that those exceptions are declining; it's anyone's guess where they'll go. But FORTRAN use by other Government agencies and contractors is still pretty strong. > Has anyone asked the government under what circumstances they would > consider returning to a Fortran standard? Isn't there more economic > incentive for persuading them to come back? Wouldn't a substantially > improved Fortran help? They never left. As for whether a "substantially improved" FORTRAN would help, help what?. I don't think DoD is going to back away from Ada, with or without F8x. As for whether existing use of FORTRAN within the Government would be "helped" by F8x, I merely note that several representatives of various U.S. Government agencies and contractors wrote public comments that opposed 8x. I believe that is justification for thinking they would prefer to use F77 than F8x. Somehow people keep tying the issue of retaining FORTRAN/77 with a rejection of FORTRAN/8x. The X3 vote says nothing about rejecting F8x. I've said numerous times in my arguments on this issue that those who want F8x may have it, but there is sufficient dissent among FORTRAN users that it seems prudent to retain F77 until either those dissenters are won over to F8x or they switch to some other language. If the use of F77 declines, as those who support F8x want us to believe will happen, then there will be no reason to reaffirm F77 five years from now. > It seems that your justification for two FORTRAN standards depends > on the existence of implementor extensions--especially real-time > interface extensions. Not at all. This particular customer's justification for bidding an existing FORTRAN application may well be based on those extensions, however. Since the Government saw fit to buy the original product, presumably those extensions were sufficiently portable (among the class of machines suitable for such real-time application) to satisfy its needs. Judging from user requests for real-time extensions, I'd say the ISO standard you cited was evidently not found to be sufficient for their needs. The Government continues to buy their products, so they must be doing something right! My justification for retaining F77 is based on the number of public comments opposed to F8x. If they don't like F8x, the only other choice we can provide them in the short term is F77 or another language entirely. I think retaining F77 is a reasonable choice. Finally, I'd like to point out (again) that portability is a relative concept. A flight simulator is different from, say, a finite-element analysis application, in that it has to deal with external hardware, it has to operate in a "hard" real-time environment, and it has tight performance requirements. Not all machines can meet these requirements, so portability to those machines is uninteresting. Still other machines are far too expensive for the task, so portability to those machines is uninteresting too. In this environment, one is interested only in portability among the machines that can serve the purpose. In many cases, the extensions to FORTRAN for this kind of real-time computing are common to all the vendors of those machines -- what more portability could you want? I'll readily agree that not everyone falls into this class of user, but that doesn't mean those users don't deserve fair treatment. If they say F8x is not suitable for their needs, who am I to argue with them? They spoke, and I listened. -- 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