Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!utah-gr!utah-cs!sunset.utah.edu!u-dmfloy
From: u-dmfloy%sunset.utah.edu@utah-cs.UUCP (Daniel M Floyd)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran vs C for computations
Message-ID: <5694@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: 6 Sep 88 05:14:37 GMT
References: <535@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Sender: news@utah-cs.UUCP
Reply-To: u-dmfloy%sunset.utah.edu.UUCP@utah-cs.UUCP (Daniel M Floyd)
Organization: University of Utah, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 27

In article <535@nikhefh.hep.nl> t68@nikhefh.hep.nl (Jos Vermaseren) writes:
...
>There is another much more annoying feature of C ...

C is not the only culprit. I'm sure you knew this.
>...
>The better thing would be to have a parameter that can be set by the user
>that determines whether an overflow or sqrt of a negative number should be
>fatal (with intelligent errormeassage please). Most fortran compilers have
>this option.

Here. Here. I'd like *all* compilers to allow the programmer (user) to
specify what to do with abnormal situations. Sometimes, I want
the application to have a fatal type. Other times, I simply cannot
halt the program under *any* condition. I'd like it to take the form of
defaulting to something reasonable but allowing something like

/* compiler option: sqrt(x)
/*	if -x do_this_routine
/*	if overflow fatal_error
/*	if underflow return_0 and flag error
...

Different compilers, different languges, different tastes, could
result in different syntax. The point you made, which I'm emphasizing
is that users want to have control over error conditions. I hope
the next generations of compilers will take this seriously.