Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: I would like to have an argument, please! (Re: F8X response (long))
Message-ID: <713@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Feb 88 23:41:30 GMT
References: <705@elxsi.UUCP> <44400017@hcx2> <2337@s.cc.purdue.edu> <2359@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 41

In response to article <2359@s.cc.purdue.edu>,
by  ags@s.cc.purdue.edu (Dave Seaman):

The original context was INCLUDE statements in Fortran,
and the claim was that INCLUDE statements should not be part of
the Fortran standard because there are ***OPERATING SYSTEMS***
which do not support dynamically named files well.

The fact that some languages, such as C, have no such difficulty under
CMS *is* relevant to Fortran in this context, because it means that
whatever difficulty Fortran may or may not experience is an artefact of
the Fortran compiler and run-time system, not an intrinsic property of
the operating system.  Were a Fortran compiler to be written in C, for
example, it would have no difficulty whatsoever with INCLUDE statements,
regardless of whether Fortran programs were able to open dynamically
named files (which feature *is* a part of Fortran 77).

Note that Dave Seaman did not say "Fortran programs cannot easily
open files by name under CMS", he said
> CMS users cannot normally open files by name unless they remember
  *********
> to issue a FILEDEF before running the program.

In CMS, there are two sorts of "file names": DSnames and DDnames.
DSnames are what's out there in the file system.
DDnames are basically pointers, a wee bit like symbolic links
or environment variables, but with extra string.  If you think of
them as an MVS compatibility feature, you won't be far wrong.
Now the giveaway is that the Fortran compiler is the
	VS Fortran Version 2
	**
compiler, that is, it is basically an MVS product.

To repeat, I loathe and detest CMS, but the difficulties of using
Fortran under CMS have nothing to do with CMS as such, nor, for
that matter, with Fortran as such.

If a UNIX Fortran compiler were to insist that all file names be
supplied through environment variables, would we blame UNIX, or
Fortran, or would we blame the compiler vendor?  Would we use such
a restriction as an argument for what Fortran should be allowed to do?