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From: gl8f@astsun7.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran -vs- C (yet again)
Message-ID: <1990Nov30.171343.2235@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 30 Nov 90 17:13:43 GMT
References: <1270009@hpcllmv.HP.COM> <771@sarnoff.sarnoff.com> <11977@milton.u.washington.edu>
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Organization: Department of Astronomy, University of Virginia
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In article <11977@milton.u.washington.edu> whit@milton.u.washington.edu (John Whitmore) writes:

>	Third: it's damned near impossible to make an interactive
>program without building in some way to fork-to-shell (on VMS, I
>use a subprocess). [...] It's an essential part of
>interactive programming (IMHO), but has never been included in
>any system-independent way.  Add this to the language definition!

Why not just write a standard subroutine interface, CALL ZSPAWN for
example, and then write a separate routine for each OS? No need to
clutter up the language for something this simple. And you can slowly
build a while library of Z-routines on a variety of platforms.