Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!hcx2!bill
From: bill@hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unaligned data and old FORTRAN
Message-ID: <93900022@hcx2>
Date: 13 Apr 89 16:19:00 GMT
References: <13998@sequent.UUCP>
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Nf-ID: #R:sequent.UUCP:13998:hcx2:93900022:000:1330
Nf-From: hcx2.SSD.HARRIS.COM!bill    Apr 13 12:19:00 1989


> The US government is another story, which is why Ada validation exists.
> There are also government validation suites for COBOL, and I think for
> FORTRAN.  They don't have the same magic status ("*the* validation suite
> for the language"), since the government does not set the standards for
> said languages.

This isn't quite so.  The FORTRAN Compiler Verification Service (FCVS)
tests and the COBOL Compiler Verification Service (CCVS) tests are
_official_ government validation suites.  You must pass them to sell a
FORTRAN or COBOL compiler to the U.S. Government.  The primary difference
between them and Ada is that the Ada standard was, first, a MIL-STD, not an
ANSI standard, and also it allows so subsetting/supersetting.  A second
difference is that the Ada validation process is much more rigorous than
FCVS or CCVS.  But this is fundamentally just a question of degree, not
substance.

Moreover, the U.S. Government _does_ set the standards for FORTRAN and
COBOL!  The mechanism is the Federal Information Processing Standard
(FIPS).  There is a FIPS for FORTRAN, COBOL, and (I believe) Ada.  Not
coincidentally, they are the same as the corresponding ANSI standards.  The
FIPS is what makes passing the validation tests a pre-requisite to selling
to the U.S. Government (or to almost any government contractor).