Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!shelby!csli!poser
From: poser@csli.Stanford.EDU (Bill Poser)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: a style question
Message-ID: <15696@csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 6 Oct 90 02:01:26 GMT
References: <15689@csli.Stanford.EDU> <65030@lanl.gov>
Reply-To: poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser)
Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
Lines: 31

In article <65030@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>
>Yes, Fortran is a moving target.  But, if you aren't up to where it
>was 12 years ago, you need to do some work on your tracking and target
>acquisition.  When I complain that C doesn't have features that I
>consider important, one of the usual responses I get is that ANSI C
>does and it unfair of me to condemn C because of what _used_ to be its
>failings.  Well, ANSI C only came into existence this January!  Turn-
>about is fair play. If a 12 year old feature is to be regarded as
>still missing from Fortran, then 12 year old C implementations should
>be regarded as representative of that language.

Well, my comment was mainly about what people mean when they refer
to "Fortran". Rightly or wrongly, to a lot, perhaps most, of the people
outside of the Fortran community, Fortran means Fortran IV or maybe Fortran
77.
 
But I'm curious as to which features these are that are not in
Classic C and are in ANSI C that you are always referred to. The only
one that comes to mind from the discussion I have followed is noalias.
Although ANSI C has some nice improvements, I don't find it terribly
different from Classic C. Offhand, I would say that function
prototypes are the most important innovation. Some of the other
changes that are formalized in the standard occurred in practice
much earlier. For example, I don't think that I have EVER used a
compiler that didn't provide the void type, even though it is
technically an innovation. Indeed, although the standard only came into
existence in January, implementations conforming to it in most respects,
containing most of the innovations, have been around for some years.
Is that true of Fortran-88/90 or whatever it will be called when it
is done?