Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tank!ncar!acdpyr!pack
From: pack@acdpyr.ucar.edu (Dan Packman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN 8x ... An intermediate standard?
Keywords: FORTRAN 8x
Message-ID: <867@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 20 Oct 88 20:54:25 GMT
References: <656@convex.UUCP> <6148@june.cs.washington.edu>
Sender: news@ncar.ucar.edu
Reply-To: pack@acdpyr.UCAR.EDU (Dan Packman)
Distribution: comp.lang.fortran
Organization: Atmospheric Chemistry Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 18

I think many readers will agree it will take some time for 8x to
be approved as a standard, implemented by vendors, and actually used.
I would have been happy with an intermediate standard that tried to
do little but standardize often included extensions to f77 (ie,
looping via while, in line comments, include statements, namelist io,
and conditional assembly [with well known predefined constants for
machines and operating systems ala cpp]).  We use a local pre-processor
called IFTRAN and with all its warts, it serves us well.

One addition to the language I would like would be a floating point
conversion intrinsic to and from IEEE floating point in direct analogy
to the network byte order macros such as htonl (host to network long)
that exist in the c world.

If we bit off a smaller piece for a standard, maybe we all could swallow it.
Dan Packman     NCAR                         INTERNET: pack@acdpyr.UCAR.EDU
(303) 497-1427  P.O. Box 3000                   CSNET: pack@ncar.CSNET
                Boulder, CO  80307       DECNET  SPAN: 9.367::PACK