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From: jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: NAG Fortran 90 announcement
Keywords: Fortran 90
Message-ID: <26334@lanl.gov>
Date: 24 Jun 91 16:31:36 GMT
References: <15634@exodus.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: news@lanl.gov
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
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The thing that's most disappointing about NAG's implementation is that
it's a preprocessor to C.  (They claim that it's a compiler because it
does "global" (throughout a whole program unit) analysis, but it still
outputs C as it's "object" code.)  This means that those users who are
the most anxious to try out the 'whole array' notation will get an very
unsatisfactory comparison because of the pessimizing effect of C on 
array (in C: pointers) calculations.

Let's hope that someone takes them up quickly on their offer to sell
the compiler to anyone who wants it and can afford to white a backend
which generates native code on some interesting machines.

J. Giles