Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!think!ames!pasteur!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!lagache
From: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: What about 'watfiv' as an intermediate standard?
Message-ID: <15881@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 Oct 88 22:34:29 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: lagache@violet.berkeley.edu (Edouard Lagache)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 35



     I would like to cast a very strong vote for an intermediate FORTRAN
     standard; indeed an existing standard: watfiv (or its updated successor
     watfor77).  The watsoft FORTRAN system has been around for years
     (indeed watfiv existed before the 77 standard, but of course the
     standards committee couldn't endorse an existing system and offend all
     the other vendors).

     I have had enough of this esoteric bull about what a new FORTRAN
     needs.  I have no doubt that watfor77 cannot be used directly, but is a
     reasonable and modest extension to FORTRAN-77 what does work and is
     proven!  FORTRAN-88 is now one year late, and probably won't show up in
     99 at this rate.  Let's take something that does work now and turn it
     into a standard with as minimal modifications as possible!

                                        Edouard Lagache
                                        School of Education
                                        U.C. Berkeley
                                    lagache@violet.berkeley.edu


     P.S. One other reason toward my bias toward watfor77 is that it has
          been a very nice dialect for the purposes of teaching.  The "high
          powered" loops of Fortran-88 may be powerful, but they are not
          very intuitive.  With all the criteria that has been thrown at the
          new standard, I think one very important criteria has been
          forgotten: ease of learning and use.  Because FORTRAN is used by
          part time programmers, it should be an easy language to learn and
          remember.  While some of the features of Fortran-88 do help users
          deal with programming (for example, providing vector operators
          that are closer to actual mathematical notation), in general it
          appears that Fortran-88 is a harder language to use.  I believe
          that ease of use should be high on the priority list of the
          standard framers - is it?