Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!apple!oliveb!sun!chiba!khb From: khb%chiba@Sun.COM (chiba) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Character aliases are Satanic exten Message-ID: <105720@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Date: 18 May 89 20:47:03 GMT References: <592@mbph.UUCP> <50500128@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <105003@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <595@mbph.UUCP> Sender: news@sun.Eng.Sun.COM Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (chiba) Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View Lines: 41 In article <595@mbph.UUCP> hybl@mbph.UUCP (Albert Hybl Dept of Biophysics SM) writes: .... >Translated for the consumer, the marketing statement reads: "We >didn't want to bother taking the old code out of our compilers, >besides if we provided consumers with a suitable filter, they might >migrate to another vendor. The last thing we wish to do is >promote portability!" No. UNISYS, Harris, Lahey and others shipped compilers w/o this "feature". All were forced to put it in by big users who said "if I can't do this, I am buying someone else's machine" . Since DEC had never disallowed it, it might be their fault... note that this happened before Sun was born (for the most part) we're off the hook (this time :>). > >In an electronic mail message from Greg Lindahl >, Greg stated that Satanic >character aliases are "used by at least one big program that I know >of: AIPS, the Astronomical Image Processing System. It consists of >3/4 million lines of code, and because it adheres to such an old and >outdated standard it has no trouble running on quite a few different >supercomputer, minisuper, and minicomputer architectures." > .... >Because a program adheres to an outdated standard is neither a >necessary nor sufficient reason to believe that it can be ported to >a particular computer. Perhaps, AIPS would be a suitable test bed >for the development of a filter program that converts the Satanic >character aliases over to proper character type. Another useful >filter would be one that replaces arithmetic if statements with >more structured control statements. AIPS is, in fact, very hard to port. Cheers. Keith H. Bierman |*My thoughts are my own. Only my work belongs to Sun* It's Not My Fault | Marketing Technical Specialist ! kbierman@sun.com I Voted for Bill & | Languages and Performance Tools. Opus (* strange as it may seem, I do more engineering now *)