Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!steinmetz!vdsvax!sierra!lamson From: lamson@sierra.uucp (scott h lamson) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: FORTRAN 88 Message-ID: <5826@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com> Date: 24 Oct 88 13:00:12 GMT References: <669@convex.UUCP> Sender: news@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com Distribution: comp.lang.fortran Lines: 45 In-reply-to: psmith@mozart.uucp's message of 24 Oct 88 02:55:53 GMT > psmith@mozart.uucp (Presley Smith) writes > Vendors have a way of providing information to their users and collecting > information from their users. > I believe that the vendors are in touch with the users and that they > listen to their user groups. > We also > attempt to represent the view of that group to X3J3 in the way we vote. Help me here. I work at General Electric Corporate Research and Development. Probably not one of your smaller companies. We have 300 Sun's, 3 dozen or so VAX's, an IBM 3081K, and a Convex 210 (220 soon...). No vendor has come here to talk about Fortran 8x ever that I have been told about. In order to have an informed opinion, I subscribe to the ACM Fortran Forum, ordered the draft of F8x, 6 copies of Fortran 8X Explained, and have asked about F8x at most vendor presentations. But the vendors have not made an effort to publicize the proposed standard here one way or the other. As for the user groups (DECUS, SHARE, CUG, or others), at least at our site, the people who might go to them are the systems managers, not people who (work for a living.. :) ) use fortran in their work. I will respecfully listen to compiler writers from vendors tell me how difficult the proposed F8x is to implement, that is their area of expertise, I do physics. But I reject the claim that any vendor has the right to say their opinions represent the views of their customers. Certainly that is not the case here, as no vendor has asked anyone I know about F8x. On the difficulty of implementing the proposed F8x, I feel that I must take the word of the experts that it will be difficult. I just think that it will be worth the cost. For each person-year that goes into writing a compiler, how many person-years go into people developing applications using that compiler? Could it be less than an order of magnitude? As for the speed of the compiler, my own opinion is this is a non-issue. The last time I worried about that was on a RAYTHEON 703, and even then the paper tape reader was slower. I spend a lot more time reading code than compiling it. That makes many of the features in modules and module procedures so very important; to get understandable readable code for complex applications. You can only worry about efficiency after you have the right answer. Scott| ARPA: lamson@ge-crd.arpa Lamson| UUCP: uunet!steinmetz!sierra!lamson (518)387-5795| UUCP: uunet!steinmetz!lamson!crd