Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!news.cs.indiana.edu!ariel.unm.edu!triton.unm.edu!prentice From: prentice@triton.unm.edu (John Prentice) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran 90 status Message-ID: <1991Apr25.100524.9831@ariel.unm.edu> Date: 25 Apr 91 10:05:24 GMT References: <1991Apr25.043355.26420@ariel.unm.edu> Organization: University of New Mexico, Albuquerque Lines: 33 In article khb@chiba.Eng.Sun.COM (Keith Bierman fpgroup) writes: >However, in the last go round several "minor" players such as IBM, >Amdahl, Sun, DECUS, and misc. national labs (and several foregin ones) >voted Aye. If Fortran Extended is not going to be recognized outside the U.S., then why are foreign reps voting on it (or am I confused about what is the U.S. standard versus the international one - ugh) ? Anyone know what the votes of the DOE labs were? Well, I hope this puts all this behind us and we can now get on to building compilers that implement all this stuff. I imagine the people on X3J3 are happy it is over at least. Whatever I may think of FE, I have to admire people willing to spend this kind of time on the standards committee. It strikes me as a rather thankless task. It will be interesting to see if there is ever another standard issued for Fortran however. Given the time it took to get this one and the fast changes occuring in scientific computing (particularly the push to parallelism), I tend to really wonder if Fortran will continue to be used for state of the art code all that much longer. Many of the heavy players in my field are now going to C++ or other languages that express parallelism more naturally. One can (and knowing this newsgroup, probably will) debate the merits of these languages till you are blue in the face, but you got to admit there is alot of pressure to find alternatives to Fortran in scientific computing. Is X3J3 thinking about that at all in contemplating where to go next? If not, what exactly are the priorities? John -- John K. Prentice john@unmfys.unm.edu (Internet) Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA Computational Physics Group, Amparo Corporation, Albuquerque, NM, USA