Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!pprg.unm.edu!hc!lll-winken!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!rb-dc1!shapiro
From: shapiro@rb-dc1.UUCP (Mike Shapiro)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: so much for X3J3
Keywords: WG5, ANSI, X3J3, Fortran, FORTRAN, standard
Message-ID: <442@rb-dc1.UUCP>
Date: 7 Apr 89 19:06:50 GMT
References: <24032@beta.lanl.gov> <97753@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <24066@beta.lanl.gov>
Reply-To: shapiro@rb-dc1.SanDiego.gould.UUCP (Michael Shapiro)
Organization: Encore/Gould, San Diego
Lines: 43

In article <24066@beta.lanl.gov> dd@beta.lanl.gov (Dan Davison) writes:
  ... nearly all deleted ...
>I have a very bad feeling about this and I don't like it.  Let Fortran
>be Fortran.

But which Fortran should we let be Fortran?  The one with the PAUSE
that actually stopped the machine?  The one with the READ INPUT TAPE
statement?   The one with ENCODE and DECODE statements?  The one with
NAMELIST?  (QUIZ: Which of these is in Fortran-8x?)

I recall that when the FORTRAN 77 standard appeared, so did most of
the same arguments.  Who would need all those extra features like
comments beginning with an asterisk or an IF/THEN/ELSEIF/ENDIF
statement block?  FORTRAN 66 (or FORTRAN IV or FORTRAN ??) was enough!
And who would ever bother implementing the whole language?  We could
just stick to the left-hand pages of the standard, which defined the
subset.  How many FORTRAN 77 Subset compilers do you see on the market
these days?

Each of the times FORTRAN has been standardized, a subset was also
specified in the standard (a separate standard ANSI X3.10-1966 and
left hand pages in ANSI X3.9-1978).  I (and several other people) have
recommended that the FORTRAN 77 standard be retained as Fortran 8x
Subset (or some similar name).  And it should be noted that any
standard-conforming FORTRAN 77 program will continue to be a
standard-conforming Fortran 8x program.  Indeed, the most difficult
transition task for many people may be remembering to use the correct
capitalization rule (as used in this paragraph).

A question to anyone who cares:

The X3J3 committee continues to use "Fortran 8x" as the working name
of the draft proposed standard.  WG5 uses "Fortran 88" as its name for
the same draft.  My preference is to follow the convention of just
using the last digits of the year (e.g., COBOL 74), so that if it
becomes a standard this year, it would be "Fortran 89" and if it slips
to next year, "Fortran 90" and so forth.  What is your preference?
Why?
-- 

Michael Shapiro, Gould/General Systems Division (soon to be Encore)
15378 Avenue of Science, San Diego, CA 92128
(619)485-0910    UUCP: ...sdcsvax!ncr-sd!rb-dc1!shapiro