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From: news@ism780c.isc.com (News system)
Newsgroups: comp.std.c,comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up)
Message-ID: <14379@ism780c.isc.com>
Date: 25 Aug 88 21:28:29 GMT
References: <64919@sun.uucp> <8358@smoke.ARPA> <4566@saturn.ucsc.edu> <3732@bsu-cs.UUCP> <9@argosy.UUCP>
Reply-To: marv@ism780.UUCP (Marvin Rubenstein)
Organization: Interactive Systems Corp., Santa Monica CA
Lines: 18

In article <9@argosy.UUCP> ian@argosy.UUCP (Ian L. Kaplan) writes:

>  The Fortran 8x committee has its problems, but lack of features is
>not one of them.  The April '87 Fortran draft standard includes a
>number of "modern programming language" features, including something
>like structures ...

>"I don't know what the most popular numeric programming language will
> look like in the year 2000, but it will be named Fortran."

Deja vu. In 1963 a commitee (Share) got together to produce FORTRAN V. It
had structures, if-then-else, switch statements (spelled 'GOTO
<expression>'), eight types of numeric data, and a whole bunch more.  After
the commitee saw what they had wrought, they decided that it was good.  But
FORTRAN V was a bad name.  So they called the language NPL (New programming
Language).  When the Naval Physics Lab complained, the commitee changed the
name again.  And Voila!  PL/I was born.

   Marv Rubinstein