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From: wsb@boise.Eng.Sun.COM (Walt Brainerd)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What to call next version
Message-ID: <7822@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 11 Feb 91 22:30:06 GMT
References: <7797@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <14244@lanl.gov>
Sender: news@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM
Lines: 46

In article <14244@lanl.gov>, jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
> 
> Well, I don't know if there's much hope, but I'd like "Fortran yy"
> (with 'yy' designating year numbers) to always refer to the Fortran
> programming language and not to this thing X3J3 has recently put
> together.  So, maybe we could get a Fortran 95 (based on Fortran 77
> with the standardization of common vendor extensions - in other words,
> standardize common practice).
> 
"This thing X3J3 put together" is also what almost the entire world
(including the USA) has voted to be "the Fortran programming language".
Thus it is logically impossible to achieve what Jim likes.
Fortunately or unfortunately, calling it something else will
not make it go away.  And incidentally, one of the important
features of the ANSI/X3 plan when proposing the name "Fortran
Extended" and keeping Fortran 77 as a standard is that, under
no circumstances, is anyone to propose extending Fortran 77
(we'll see if they can stick to it).

And I also thought data structures, recursion, array processing,
DO ENDDO, namelist, include, and the bit intrinsic functions
(to name a few important new features in Fortran 90) were
common vendor extensions.  Of course, there are some, like
modules, that are not.  If we stuck to this philosophy, there
would be no character data type or IF-THEN-ELSE in Fortran 77
because these were not common vendor extensions in the early '70s.
Would Fortran 77 be a better language without these two features?

> I know.  Walt will jump all over this suggestion.  This is the only
> article I will submit on this subject as I don't want to get into
> the same argument yet again.
> 
> J. Giles

Before I jump too hard, I would like to understand.
I am not sure what the "same argument" refers to, but sometime
soon, people will be proposing the beginning of development
of Fortran 2000 (or whatever), so this is the time to start
discussing the fundamental philosophical and technical questions,
not in 2001 when it's all over again.  So I think there should be
lots of "arguments" about this from anybody that is interested.
--
Walt Brainerd        Sun Microsystems, Inc.
wsb@eng.sun.com      MS MTV 5-40
                     Mountain View, CA 94043
                     415/336-5991