Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!gatech!udel!burdvax!Grumpy!wgh From: wgh@Grumpy.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: (none) Summary: FORTRAN upgrades: dusty deck syndrome Message-ID: <326@Grumpy.UUCP> Date: 16 Aug 88 21:04:38 GMT References: <651@<8052> <50500063@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Organization: UNISYS CS, Blue Bell, PA Lines: 23 In article <50500063@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>,mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: > 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. > Fortran users > expect that ALL presently working programs will continue to run on > all future versions of compilers on the same hardware. Doug McDonald There is a fairly simple solution: anybody who wants to enhance a language in a way which is not upward portable should show how to provide a translation utility. For example, upgrading from FORTRAN-66 to RATFOR was easy because BSD4.2 and BSD4.3 provide a utility called 'struct' which does the transition (and also cleans up the code by re-ordering it to minimize gotos and to use while, if-then-else, etc). So can such a utility be written for FORTRAN 66-to-8x or 77-to-8x? If so, OK, otherwise FORTRAN 8x will probably be a flop like Algol-68. -- Bill Hutchison, DP Consultant rutgers!cbmvax!burdvax!Grumpy!wgh Unisys UNIX Portation Center "What one fool can do, another can!" P.O. Box 500, M.S. B121 Ancient Simian Proverb, quoted by Blue Bell, PA 19424 Sylvanus P. Thompson, in _Calculus Made Simple_