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