Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!bbn!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!lagache
From: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Gripes on missing FORTRAN-8x features.
Message-ID: <6889@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 7 Feb 88 00:24:41 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 39
Keywords: INCLUDE, WHILE, Macros.



          I am disturbed (to put it mildly) by some of the comments on why
     some reasonably obvious features have been omitted from FORTRAN 8x.
     Lets take a look at some of them:

     1.)  INCLUDE: The standard reply is that by eliminating the need for
          common blocks, one will eliminate the need for this statement -
          huh?   "C" has an include statement, and have never had common
          blocks.  It is unreasonable to suppose that I might want to have a
          header file of derived types, or symbolic constants, or macros
          (more on that later).

     2.)  WHILE: FORTRAN 8x contains looping constructs that are more
          powerful than WHILE.  So what?  When I am trying to read in some
          indefinite number of items from input, what I need is a WHILE loop
          (or a REPEAT-UNTIL).  Why clutter up a simple mental template with
          a more complex representation of such a simple process.

     3.)  MACROS: The MODULE construct will eliminate the need for macros in
          *most* cases.  This is fine and dandy for the cases it does cover,
          but what about the cases it doesn't?  Since macros can be
          implemented quite inexpensively, and improve program efficiency,
          why not include them?

     4.)  POINTERS, BIT OPERATIONS, and SIGNIFICANT Blanks.  Here people
          have already done most of the shelling for me.  However, I have
          one suggestion on the issue of Significant blanks.  If the "dusty
          deck" crowd needs blanks to be insignificant, then define a
          dialect for FORTRAN 8x that has identical to the final standard
          but where blanks are significant.  Then it would be up to compiler
          developers to choose whichever dialect they wish to implement.

     Okay flames away!  I shouldn't even be in this mess - I spend most of
     my time programming in PROLOG!


                                             Edouard Lagache
                                             lagache@violet.berkeley.edu