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From: hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: What to call next version (was: Implicit parameters ...)
Message-ID: <1991Feb11.223050.25218@ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Date: 11 Feb 91 22:30:50 GMT
References: <7797@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM> <14244@lanl.gov>
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Organization: NCSA - National Center for Supercomputing Applications
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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).

But that would be contrary to common practice! :-)   Seriously, this is a
matter of persepective.  When FORTRAN 77 was adopted, many of the features
it introduced were already common practice, but many others were not.
Fortran 90 similarly includes both new features that are already common
practice and those that are not.  Unquestionably, the balance between these
classes of features is different, and the sources of the features span a
much wider field, but a standard that did nothing but ratify common practice
would be a throwback to the original 1966 FORTRAN standard.

Your "Fortran 95" sounds like a subset of Fortran 90; the _common_ vendor
extensions I am aware of are advance implementations of Fortran 90 features
or outgrowths of FORTRAN 77 or Mil. Std. 1753 that have been incorporated
into Fortran 90.  "Fortran 95" wouldn't do much to improve my programming
environment (because those features are already common).  Fortran 90 has
the potential to make significant improvements if it is decently implemented.
-- 
Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications