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From: holtz@clan.UUCP (Neal Holtz)
Newsgroups: net.lang
Subject: Re: ANSI BASIC  (really: Fortran-8X)
Message-ID: <160@clan.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 23-Mar-85 17:31:31 EST
Article-I.D.: clan.160
Posted: Sat Mar 23 17:31:31 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Mar-85 06:46:55 EST
Distribution: net.lang,net.lang.f77
Organization: Systems Eng., Carleton Univ., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 46

>> Oh, yeah?  Where were YOU when the call went out for people to
>> participate in the ANSI Basic committee?  Where were YOU when the first
>> public review began ...
>
>  ... how would I know that in fact,
> new languages were going to be developed but just given the old names?
>  ... Now that we know, we complain.
>
>  ... and (I) did not "learn" Fortran-77 until last year.   A ton
> of stuff was added that does not belong in Fortran.  If someone wanted to
> invent a new language with exactly that syntax for character strings etc.,
> they should have done so; they should not have called it Fortran.

Take this as a warning -- the changes proposed for Fortran-8X make the
changes of Fortran-77 look minimal and insignificant.  If the proposals
are accepted, the next version of Fortran will be *MUCH* larger and
a completely different language.  It is legitimate to say that the
various committees are inventing a new language (that is largely
compatible with the old).  Among the major changes are: array data
types (sort of) and array operations; derived data types (i.e. records
plus something akin to packages in Ada, complete with user-defined
operators); internal and recursive procedures; modules; more "modern"
control structures; event handling, and a fair bit more.

I believe that ANSI Committee X3J3 will submit the proposal for public 
review sometime late this year.  Everyone that cares about Fortran
should give that document careful and thoughtful study.  Until then,
there are a few reports available.  Some of them:

   [1] Wagener, J.L., "Status of Work Toward Revision of Programming
       Language Fortran", ACM SIGNUM Newsletter, Vol 19, No. 3, July
       1984, pp 5-42.

   [2] Humar, J.L., "Fortran: Directions for the Future", National
       Lecture Tour, 1984, Canadian Society for Civil Engineering,
       Dept. of Civil Engineering, Ottawa, Ontario  K1S 5B6.

I may be able to provide a limited number of copies of [2] (no 
guarantee, though).

Neal Holtz

cdn:    holtz@cascade.carleton.cdn
uucp:   ...dciem!nrcaero!clan!holtz
csnet:  holtz%cascade.carleton.cdn@ubc.csnet
bitnet: holtz@carleton.bitnet