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From: link@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 88
Keywords: fortran standards
Message-ID: <15851@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 22 Oct 88 07:58:30 GMT
References: <2060@unmvax.unm.edu>
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Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <2060@unmvax.unm.edu> brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd)
writes:
>how frustrating it is to conduct a rational technical argument
>with people like the folks from Convex, who say that
>
>b)  the proposed Fortran 88 is no good because some Ph. D. computer scientists
>    had a hand in developing it.

As far as my own postings are concerned, I did not mean to impune the
legitimate and important contributions of Ph.D. computer scientists
to language theory. What I object to is turning FORTRAN from a number
cruncher (FORmula TRANslator), it's original scope, into an all-purpose
language with lots of bells and whistles, simply because some Ph.D.
computer scientists *evidently* feel that this should be so. The new
standard does not serve my needs.

I feel that I should speak up, since numerical analysis and modeling
in FORTRAN is what I do for a living. I *do* want an improved FORTRAN,
but I want the "improvements" to be truly useful, without overloading
the language with constructs *deemed*, but not proven, useful by the
aforementioned Ph.D. computer scientists.

As far as I can tell, the needs of the end-users (such as myself) were
not given much consideration in drafting the proposed standard.
(This is a subjective opinion only, please spare me the flames).

>Some other basic facts of recent postings need to be corrected:
>
>1.  My first language (other than an assembler) was Fortran,
>    first learned in 1960, before Pascal and C were invented, I believe.

If you can't remember, no wonder FORTRAN is in trouble! :-)

>    That does not mean that the good ideas from these more recent languages
>    should not be borrowed.

I agree with this, but only so far as it improves FORTRAN without changing
its scope. I don't want a lot of garbage simply because Pascal or C has it!
If you want another Ada, it's already been invented.


Richard Link, Ph.D.
Space Sciences Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley
link@ssl.berkeley.edu