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From: gl8f@astsun8.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What is the FORTRAN for ?
Keywords: FORTRAN, stupidity of users who don't know their needs
Message-ID: <1990Jul25.210639.20509@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 25 Jul 90 21:06:39 GMT
References: <1990Jul25.174153.16896@ecn.purdue.edu> <11029@chaph.usc.edu>
Sender: news@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU
Followup-To: alt.religion.computers
Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
Lines: 23

In article <11029@chaph.usc.edu> ajayshah@aludra.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:

>I recently hit a research group which worked exclusively in
>fortran, and had to write fortran for a while, and was it a
>nightmare!!  A language which has no data structures to speak of,
>no dynamic allocation, no recursion, everything passed by
>reference, no checking for number/type of arguments to
>functons/subroutines, no control over scoping..not to mention the
>silly syntactic irritations.

If you were using FORTRAN 77 to write programs which need the features
it doesn't have, you're using the wrong tool. Use another one. If you
are writing programs for which F77 is good, use it. It just so happens
that the programs I write fit the F77 model well.

BTW, checking the number/type of arguments to functions/subroutines is
something which can be done. The Sun compiler doesn't do it, but
running the code through f2c does.

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