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From: rwa@auvax.UUCP (Ross Alexander)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: F8X comments
Message-ID: <402@auvax.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Nov-87 01:42:55 EST
Article-I.D.: auvax.402
Posted: Sun Nov 15 01:42:55 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 16-Nov-87 03:57:57 EST
References: <50500015@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <5774@j.cc.purdue.edu> <422@uni2.bcm.tmc.edu>
Organization: Athabasca U., Alberta, Canada
Lines: 18
Summary: what's the beef?

In article <422@uni2.bcm.tmc.edu>, rick@svedberg.bcm.tmc.edu (Richard H. Miller) writes:
> Augh! Fortran has been around for many many years. Why is there such an
> insistance upon "improving" a language to the point it is totally different
> from existing implementations of the language. You will force a rewrite of
> many millions of lines of working code. This will force the redeployment of
> many programmers to do this upgrade which will not allow them to work on 
> *new* applications. 

No it won't.  Dusty decks can be complied with the *old* compiler; new
decks can be compiled with either, depending on which side of the bed the
programmer who wrote them got up on that day.  Just because someone invents
a new language, x, and chooses to call it y.2 where y is a previously existing
language, doesn't make any difference to however many gazillions of lines
of y code already out there.  I mean really, are the compiler police going
to come and take your fortran {II, IV, -66, -77} compiler & libraries away?
Get serious.

Ross Alexander @ you too can read the path