Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!xait!g-rh
From: g-rh@XAIT.Xerox.COM (Richard Harter)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: How to supplant FORTRAN (Was: Algol-68 down for the count)
Message-ID: <37846@XAIT.Xerox.COM>
Date: 3 Dec 88 18:09:13 GMT
References: <406@ubbpc.UUCP> <3688@hubcap.UUCP> <416@ubbpc.UUCP>
Reply-To: g-rh@XAIT.Xerox.COM (Richard Harter)
Organization: Xerox Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Lines: 25

In article <416@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:

> Now that we have gotten back to the topic I really wanted to discuss, I 
>propose to focus on one particular issue:
> How can we (or you) produce a language that will supplant FORTRAN, in the 
>sense that folks using FORTRAN would voluntarily migrate their code to the
>new language, or that economics would force them to migrate?

	This is not an easy proposition.  For that matter it is not clear
that there is any language which is so clearly better than Fortran that it
is worth the effort.  "better" is a relative term -- one has to take into
account who uses a language and what it is used for.

	As a tecnical matter, however, the language would have to meet at
least two requirements.  The first is that the character set of the
language should not include any characters that are not on both IBM
and Ascii terminals (a major problem with C).  The second is that there
must be a fortran to X translater that accepts readable fortran and produces
readable X; it is strongly advisable that there be one going the other way.

-- 

In the fields of Hell where the grass grows high
Are the graves of dreams allowed to die.
	Richard Harter, SMDS  Inc.