Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert
From: hirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: (none)
Message-ID: <50500064@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 15 Aug 88 15:23:00 GMT
References: <651@<8052>
Lines: 29
Nf-ID: #R:<8052:651:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:50500064:000:1604
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!hirchert    Aug 15 10:23:00 1988


Doug McDonald (mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu) writes:

>    One severe problem with the Fortran 8x proplsal is that it implies
>that Fortran 9x will cause something like 90% of all present programs
>to stop working. That's right, a very large majority might die. It
>doesn't guarantee that the 9x committee will do this - it just says
>that the user is warned that they might. I, along with almost 
>everyone I know consider this so unacceptable that, if it remains
>in f8x , then f8x is so fatally flawed that it must be rejected in toto.

Although this was true of some of the working drafts of Fortran 8x, it is not
true of the version released for public comment.  It does contain a list of
features that might be removed in 9x, but that list is fairly short and contains
no major features.  The big and scary list in the Fortran 8x draft was the list
of deprecated features (i.e. the features X3J3 thought you might be better off
in the long run not using).  This list included features that are currently
in use in nearly every Fortran program, but under the rules specified in the
Fortran 8x draft, they could have been removed from the language only in the
successor to 9x (perhaps 20 years from now) and then only if specific warning
were given in 9x (10 years from now).  In any case, X3J3 voted at its most
recent meeting to remove the concept of deprecation from its document, so the
scary list is no more.

>Doug McDonald, representing the University of Illinois Department
>of Chemistry Fortran users

Kurt W. Hirchert     hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu
National Center for Supercomputing Applications