Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mcnc!ecsvax.uncecs.edu!dukeac!wolves!ggw From: ggw@wolves.uucp (Gregory G. Woodbury) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: REACTIONS TO 8X VOTE Summary: F8x isn't fortran! Message-ID: <1989Oct27.023533.3440@wolves.uucp> Date: 27 Oct 89 02:35:33 GMT References: <7485@xenna.Xylogics.COM> Reply-To: ggw@wolves.UUCP (Gregory G. Woodbury) Followup-To: comp.lang.fortran Organization: Wolves Den UNIX BBS Lines: 54 In article <7485@xenna.Xylogics.COM> PDM1881%mvs.draper.com@RELAY.CS.NET writes: >> >> > This vote is good news for the ENTIRE FORTRAN community. >> >> PRESLEY, YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS! It is an unmitigated disaster. > Actually, the maintenance of the F77 standard as "official" is good news here. I have had a long fight to get one of our main theoretical people to "adopt" f77 for use. The only way this was finally forced was that he was migrated (forceably ;-) to a machine that didn't support some of the old FORTRAN II/IV features! I finally got a look at the F8x stuff -- what is this language? > >What else can I do? X3J3 has consistently refused to make the kind of >sweeping changes to 8x which are required. Their small simplifications >have been largely cancelled by recent additions. I feel it is likely >that a majority of FORTRAN programmers in the U.S. do not want 8x. The >vast majority at my company certainly don't want it. Should I meekly go >along? Ultimately, all I get to say is yes or no. I say no. HEAR HEAR! The language defined by F8x is not just a simple expansion of the capabilities of f77. In order to use the new features that let one get more performance out of the hardware one has to RE-LEARN the language! I am positive that there would be NO way to get the person I mentioned above to adopt F8x -- he'd probably quit first! > >[Keep in] >mind that a significant number of active FORTRAN programmers do not know >the correct IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF syntax of FORTRAN 77 well enough to use >it regularly. > But, it fits in smoothly with the previous versions of FORTRAN. And the previous methods still work as originally defined. >The proposed standardization of INCLUDE is useless. It has clearly been >written to silence those who clamored for it, without an attempt to >provide a portable tool. The authors clearly want MODULE-USE to be >employed and INCLUDE to be avoided. > So much for "formalizing existing coding practice". Practically all of the f77 compilers that I have seen allow some form of include, or you can preprocess the program source yourself before compilation. The purpose of a standard it to make it easy to have the same code compile and run on different platforms without having to be too concerned with the details of specific implementations. Some days you can't win for loseing. -- Gregory G. Woodbury Sysop/owner Wolves Den UNIX BBS, Durham NC UUCP: ...dukcds!wolves!ggw ...dukeac!wolves!ggw [use the maps!] Domain: ggw@cds.duke.edu ggw@ac.duke.edu ggw%wolves@ac.duke.edu Phone: +1 919 493 1998 (Home) +1 919 684 6126 (Work) [The line eater is a boojum snark! ]