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From: jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN vs. "PC languages"
Message-ID: <24639@lanl.gov>
Date: 29 May 91 22:48:35 GMT
References: <31746@rouge.usl.edu> <1991May29.205700.27104@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>
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Distribution: usa
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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In article <1991May29.205700.27104@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>, vsnyder@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Van Snyder) writes:
|> 
|> Fortran 90 improves on Fortran 77 arrays by making whole arrays and array
|> sections first class objects.  And now machine inquiry is standardized as well.
|> 
|> There are lots of things in Fortran 90 that I would have done differently
|> (mostly more regularly), but on the whole, nothing compares yet for numerical
|> work.

Well, there is, but I doubt it will ever be implemented.  There was some
talk about revising the standard more often (like every 5 years) in the
last couple of weeks.  Well, 5 years from Fortran 77 (1982) a document
was published by the DOE called the LWG Fortran Manual.  It was the result
of the DOE Language Working Group effort to propose useful extensions to
Fortran 77.  The committee was small and exclusive with representatives
from only the 8 DOE labs.

In every respect, the LWG Fortran proposal is superior to the Fortran 90
proposed standard.  Not only does it beat Fortran 90 on a feature by 
feature basis, it also has the obvious features that Fortran 90 left out:
variant records, recursive data types, asynchronous I/O, BIT type, Cray
style pointers, conditional compilation, macros, and compiler directives
for listing and optimizataion control.  And yes, it also has machine
inquiry functions.

There are things in the LWG document I would have done differently if
it were solely up to me.  But, I would support it as a proposed standard
and I oppose the Fortran 90 proposal (which is a decade later and not as
good).

J. Giles