Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!peregrine!elroy!ames!ncar!oddjob!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: (none) Message-ID: <50500063@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: 9 Aug 88 13:13:00 GMT References: <651@<8052> Lines: 27 Nf-ID: #R:<8052:651:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:50500063:000:1294 Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald Aug 9 08:13:00 1988 Eugene Miya writes: >We have to resolve this dusty deck problem. If the problem is >pure compatibility, then we can never win. Not if users want >performance >increases, reliability increases, etc. I don't see users offering >what they are willing to compromise. Should they prioritize what >they are willing to give up in order to get added features they want? The answer to that is simple: absolutely nothing. Fortran users expect that ALL presently working programs will continue to run on all future versions of compilers on the same hardware. They expect that all legal Fortran 77 programs will run on all compilers called Fortran on all hardware for all time now and in the future. 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. Doug McDonald, representing the University of Illinois Department of Chemistry Fortran users