Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!mcdchg!chinet!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!sun!chiba!khb
From: khb%chiba@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?
Keywords: FORTRAN PL/I kludge
Message-ID: <75318@sun.uucp>
Date: 30 Oct 88 02:48:46 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 53

In article <388@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
>
> I haven't programmed seriously in FORTRAN for a decade or so, so maybe some
>FORTRAN advocates can tell me something: why is there an effort to make up
>a new standard at all?
> It seems to me that if folks keep kludging up FORTRAN to make it more
>"modern", they arrive at a baroque mess that serves nobody well.
> Modern FORTRAN has been tried before: it was called PL/I and it flopped
>miserably.

CS types (i.e. all of US ACM members :>) are always talking about
reuseable tools. FORTRAN users have them. In spades. Giving up all the
existing software is not a reasonable thing to do.

PL/I was NOT a modernized FORTRAN. It was conceived as a language to
replace FORTRAN & COBOL. Of course, it failed at both.

F88 is NOT just a set of kludges. I stongly recommend Metcalf and
Reid's F8x explained. To summerize all the years of effort in  a
couple of words (take with salt) : f88 is a language designed to
accomodate the needs of scientific computing. If another language
satisfied this community, this would be unecessary...but nothing comes
close. 

> Wouldn't the numerical computation community be better advised to find or
>develop a modern language, e.g. something like Modula-2 or occam or whatever
>(insert your favorite BNF here), possibly with the addition of some stuff
>to facilitate numerical work, then to put the effort into writing good
>FORTRAN-to-UTOPIA-99 translators.

As above. This is much too expensive, nor is it obvious that f88 is
not "a modern language". Overloaded operators, modules, abstract
datatypes, special numericalenvironment functions, and the rest seem
to fit the bill". F88 is not utopia 99; but it is modern.

>I just don't see that making more complex, kludgy FORTRANoid languages is
>a good use of time and money.

I just don't see that throwing about $1+ Billion dollars of software
is a viable alternative. Nor that anything on the market comes close
to F88 as a language that supports scientific computing. F88 sans the
old f66 features would be close to what you suggest. If the current
pace of development holds up this sort of thing MAY come to pass, in
another 20-30 years. Then again, we may chose to keep computed goto
and arithmetic if forever, to help remembe rthe early days "when men
carried swords of stone". :>>





Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus