Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!snorkelwacker!usc!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!lanl!jlg
From: jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran Extended Standard
Message-ID: <65400@lanl.gov>
Date: 10 Oct 90 20:45:56 GMT
References: <1990Oct9.213414.19147@hamblin.math.byu.edu>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 36

From article <1990Oct9.213414.19147@hamblin.math.byu.edu>, by halliday@hamblin.math.byu.edu (David Halliday):
> [...]
>     I just received the responses to my comments today!  The worst problem
> I have is that the standards committee apparently misunderstood some of my
> ``most important'' comments---I'll have to try again.  (The main thing I
> dislike about the present proposed standard is the machine dependent 
> ``KIND'' numbers, and the UGLY syntax they engender as applied to
> constants---the proposed standard of 1988 was much better in this regard
> IMHO.)

Yes, a friend of mine calls KIND: "the anti-portability feature".
I agree.

As most readers of this newsgroup will probably recall, my major
complaint about the proposed standard is the 'pointer-to-array-slice'
feature.  It gives no additional functionality - it's just a simple
form of syntactic sugar.  Now, I have no a priori objection to
syntactic sugar, so long as it's free.  But, this proposal inhibits
optimization by introducing aliasing unnecessarily where it's used.
The TARGET attribute limits the damage, but doesn't come close to
eliminating it.

I haven't received the responses to my comments yet.  I already
know that they were ignored.  I expect them not to be directly
answered either.  That's what the responses to the first public
review did - most of the 'answers' were of the form "the committee
chose not to do that".  I could tell that much from reading the
new proposals.  What the public review responses should contain
is sensible explanations of _why_ the committee chose to do what
it did.  It's hard to imagine technical justifications for a number
of the things that the committee has chosen to do.

Oh well, one more round.  I don't suppose they'll listen this
time either - nor explain why they didn't.

J. Giles