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From: hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: FORTRAN 8x parser/lexer .NE. compil
Message-ID: <50500084@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 88 15:55:00 GMT
References: <656@convex.UUCP>
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Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert    Oct 24 10:55:00 1988


Steve Rowan(rowan@mozart.uucp) writes:
>1. FORTRAN 8x contains every feature of Ada except tasking.
Nonsense!  It doesn't have locally ambiguous expressions, Ada-style generics,
Ada-style derived types and operations, representation specifications, or
exception handling (including the detection of a wide range of exceptional
conditions by default - adding to the optimization burden), just to name a few.
In fact, if I go back and look at the literature that describes the
problems in recognizing Ada, I find none of those features in Fortran 8x.  If
I look at the features that vendors omitted from their early incomplete releases
of Ada (presumably because they were hard features to do), I again find features
that are not present in Fortran 8x.  (Now, not being perfect, I'm certain that
I may have missed some feature in Fortran 8x that is analogous to a feature of
Ada that caused at least one vendor difficulty.  My point remains that a large
part of the features of Ada that cause implementation difficulty are _not_
part of Fortran 8x)

[Steve then went on to point out complications in Fortran 8x that are not in
Ada.  I do not challenge that list.  I would point out
a. Many of those "problems" are already solved in FORTRAN 77 processors.
b. Many of those "problems" are lexical or syntactic, and as Steve has pointed
   out in earlier postings, the lexer/parser isn't where the major part of the
   work is.]

Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications