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From: usenet@nlm.nih.gov (usenet news poster)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 9X replaced by Ada 9X ?
Keywords: C++
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.032924.9774@nlm.nih.gov>
Date: 25 Sep 90 03:29:24 GMT
References: <1990Sep13.013750.24378@relay.wpd.sgi.com>
Reply-To: states@tech.NLM.NIH.GOV (David States)
Organization: National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Md.
Lines: 43

In article <1990Sep13.013750.24378@relay.wpd.sgi.com> bean@putter.wpd.sgi.com (Bean Anderson) writes:

>Many major traditional Fortran users are already switching
>over to Ada (e.g. NASA).   Fortran 9X is becoming a complex
>language and those who want the extra features are going to 
>switch to Ada -- those who do not want the extra features
>will stick with Fortran 77.  Therefore, Fortran 9X will not
>be a major commercial language.  [...]
>So, netland, what is the future for Fortran 9X?  Is this
>argument just so much hogwash?  Will Fortran live forever?

In the academic chemistry/biophysics world a big, complicated,
buggy and late Fortran 90 would run a greater risk of pushing
people into C and C++ than into Ada.  There are two driving forces 
behind this, the portability and the enormous number of C programmers
in the world.  Even if the current draft of Fortran 90 is accepted
and the world sets out to write compilers, it is going to be at
least two or three years before an academic scientist computing
in a heterogeneous Unix/workstation environment is going to have
any reasonable prospect of expecting code which utilizes the
full functionality of Fortran 90 to port freely (and bug freely)
between platforms from different vendors.  Since heterogneous
workstation environments are the norm rather than exception, this
is a critical issue.  A clear indication that vendors were committed
to prompt Fortran 90 implementation would be a big help.

C++ is available on a number of platforms now, offers upward compatability 
(from C), and, with object definition and operator overloading, much of
the syntactic simplification of Fortran 90 arrays with much greater
versatility.  The major problem that I see with C++ is that these
object definitions are not part of the language so everyone is free to
implement their own (incompatible) versions.  Imagine programing in C if
every site wrote their own version of stdio.h.

I don't think the pointer code efficiency issues in Fortran 90 are a
major issue.  If a clear compact syntax reduces the number of bugs in
the 95% of my code which account for 2% of the run time, I will gladly
do a profiling run and recode the few inner loops where it really
matters.

>		Bean

David States