Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert From: hirchert@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Sig blanks (was Message from God) Message-ID: <1990Feb1.165002.5926@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 1 Feb 90 16:50:02 GMT References: <5974@eos.UUCP> <1990Jan13.154645.506@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> <2699@tukki.jyu.fi> <1664@bnlux0.bnl.gov> Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana Lines: 25 In article bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) writes: >In article <1664@bnlux0.bnl.gov> bam@bnlux0.bnl.gov (Bruce A. Martin) writes: > > ANSI did not *then* allow the notion of "deprecation". ... > >To be fair, this isn't quite accurate. There are not, and to my knowledge >have never have been, any ANSI rules regarding "deprecation" or >"obsolescence". X3J3 made these up on their own. ... To be fair, this isn't quite accurate, either. After the furor over COBOL 80 and the Travelers Insurance lawsuit, X3 and SPARC began developing intralanguage compatibility guidelines. X3J3's concepts of deprecation and obsolescence were its attempts to implement those guidelines. Having experienced the problems involved in the conversion from FORTRAN 66 to FORTRAN 77, especially with respect to the change from Hollerith data to CHARACTER, X3J3 had already been planning on something like this; the SPARC guidelines simply helped shape the specifics. It might be worth noting that X3J3 ended up following one of the more conservative approaches in the SPARC guidelines. Other alternatives in the guidelines give standards committees substantially more leeway for making incompatible changes than X3J3 has allowed itself. -- Kurt W. Hirchert hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu National Center for Supercomputing Applications