Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!cornell!batcomputer!itsgw!steinmetz!vdsvax!sierra!lamson
From: lamson@sierra.uucp (scott h lamson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Report on WG5 meeting in Paris
Message-ID: <5719@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 6 Oct 88 12:22:43 GMT
References: <838@cernvax.UUCP> <44400024@hcx2>
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In-reply-to: bill@hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM's message of 3 Oct 88 13:00:00 GMT



For the past week or two, any computer vendor coming here I have asked
the following question:

If there are two Fortran 8x standards (ANSI and ISO), will your
company support the ISO standard?  

if NO, then thank you and goodbye.

That's my humble contribution to the economics of F8x...

If I were with a computer vendor, I would be asking what is the 
US response to the draft standard from the consumers.  The X3J3
response looks very weighted to vendors from the list I saw,
and is admittedly negative.
The WG5 response seems to be very consumer dominated, and is very
positive.  


Question:  How expensive would it be to provide and support two
Fortran compilers?   If ANSI is a subset, then the cost would be zero?
If not, they still could use the same back-end (some vendors use
the same code generator for Fortran, C and ADA now.)  You would need
a code generator for some intermediate language, I presume.  What does
that imply for the economics?


My best hope right now would be for X3J3 to make no more changes to
the draft than would require a second public review, and for both
ANSI and ISO to agree on it.  The one feature I see that adds the most
complexity and seems to have the least support and added functionality
is generalized precision.  Just give me compiler options to have the
compiler implement real/double as 16/32/64/128 bits, and I wouldn't
miss it at all.

        Scott|  ARPA:      lamson@ge-crd.arpa
       Lamson|  UUCP:      uunet!steinmetz!sierra!lamson
(518)387-5795|  UUCP:      uunet!steinmetz!lamson!crd