Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!hcx2!bill
From: bill@hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?
Message-ID: <44400030@hcx2>
Date: 8 Nov 88 20:36:00 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP>
Lines: 22
Nf-ID: #R:ubbpc.UUCP:388:hcx2:44400030:000:1170
Nf-From: hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM!bill    Nov  8 15:36:00 1988


>  Remember the Conspiracy Theory of vendor-customer relations [ :-) ]
> Vendors do not implement non-standard extensions to their products
> to BENEFIT customers, but to trap them into writing
> non-portable code, thereby to keep them from converting their programs
> to some other vendor's systems.

This "Theory" may have been true of some vendor(s) at one time, but I
think it is safe to say it is total bunk now.  Competition for business
is very keen, but the user community (except for PCs) is not growing
that rapidly.  Today's buyers are yesterday's (and last decade's)
buyers; many new sales are either upgrades of old machines or for
expansion of computing facilities.  This means that if a vendor wants
new business, it has to be taken away from some other vendor.  In that
situation, the first thing the user asks is, "How difficult will it
be to port X's code to your machine?"  That is why many vendors have
been busy these last few years implementing other vendors' extensions:
we have to to survive.

Are vendors against standardization?  NO WAY!  The non-portability
issue works against us (at least now) far more often than it works to
our advantage.