Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!microsoft!bobal
From: bobal@microsoft.UUCP (Bob Allison)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 88
Summary: A draft w/out MODULEs
Keywords: fortran standards
Message-ID: <1104@microsoft.UUCP>
Date: 26 Oct 88 16:08:46 GMT
References: <2060@unmvax.unm.edu> <15851@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <74170@sun.uucp> <17070@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: bobal@microsoft.UUCP (Bob Allison (uunet!microsoft!bobal))
Organization: Microsoft Corp., Redmond WA
Lines: 31

In article <17070@ames.arc.nasa.gov> lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Hugh LaMaster) writes:
>
> [...]
>
>So, getting back to the original posting: suppose we leave out MODULE.
>How many people still object?
>-- 
Well, at least one of the proposals at the last meeting did just that and
it got fairly good support (I would say it was first or second among the
plans).  To me, this is one of two areas in the current draft which really
give me worries: generalized precision is the other.  Now, I don't believe
generalized precision is difficult to implement, I just believe it is a
completely illusory concept.  We don't anticipate machines with more than
three or four floating point precisions, and, if IEEE has their way, those
precisions will be well-defined and portable.  So I support defining a
couple of data types with specified minimum precisions and leaving it at
that (if we defined REAL to be at least 6 digits and some new data type to
be at least 14 it seems we will have solved ninety percent of the problem 
in a portable way.  In fact, more portably than generalized precision which
will not guarantee that if you ask for 14 digits you will get it).  Also,
generalized precision has serious problems if different library vendors
select different precisions to market their libraries in.

I am also worried about array notation on scalar machines: it is true you
can get reasonable code on a scalar machine, but it requires very elaborate
optimization methods, which a lot of companies do not have the resources
to implement.  So, in general, I believe that scalar machines are going to
do a pretty crummy job on array expressions.  I wish we could tighten up 
the array language a little bit to improve that situation somewhat.  But I
cannot argue against the value of array operations.

Bob Allison