Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!vdsvax!sierra!lamson
From: lamson@sierra.uucp (scott h lamson)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: fortran 8x
Message-ID: <5071@vdsvax.steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 10 Aug 88 12:15:21 GMT
References: <133@garfield.RDL.COM> <20931@beta.lanl.gov> <1228@eos.UUCP>
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In-reply-to: eugene@eos.UUCP's message of 7 Aug 88 21:32:39 GMT

>  eugene@eos.UUCP (Eugene Miya) wrote:
>Anyways, Dan's comment makes we want to ask, "Well, what is Fortran?"
I think Fortran is a user interface specification.  I type
"      x= a+b
       print *,x
"
and a few magic steps later something happens.  But if I type
"      x= a-b
       print *,x
"
something else happens.  So Fortran is my user interface to control 
what all the hardware I never see actually does for me.  That leads me
to the conclusion that the most important aspect of Fortran is how
well it fills the user interface requirement.  Other criteria are that
it uniquely specify what the user wants done (the end result more so
than the intermediate steps), that it be compilable, that the
resultant machine code be efficient.  But the way I see it, how well
Fortran interfaces with the user is first and most important.  The
other criteria are certainly significant, no question.


>Perhaps we Should freeze F66 and develop new languages (F8X).
I also wonder if we shouldn't more-or-less freeze Fortran-77 and use the
proposed Fortran-8x standard (with the obsolescant features dropped
immediately) as the basis for a new alternative scientific/engineering
language (EFORT, evolutionary Fortran?) rather than trying to achieve
a global comprimise.  


>We have to resolve this dusty deck problem.  If the problem is
>pure compatibility, then we can never win.
There are computer scientists here with fortran -> Ada translators
they have written.  Certainly it seems feasible to me to provide
filters which would remove obsolete features from dusty deck Fortran
and replace them with more modern features as we learn more about how
the Fortran user interface can be improved.  Vendors who have extended
Fortran-77 with non-standard extensions could provide filters to
convert their extensions into newly standardized features.  Then we
can allow Fortran to evolve by adding new features which are judged to
be important, keep the language manageable by dropping features which
didn't work or have been replaced by improvements, and still preserve
the investment in existing code.  




>What is about Fortran which makes it what it is?  What's Fortran-like?
Viewed as a user interface, Fortran supports concepts which make sense
to its clientele: integer, real and complex numbers,  vectors,
matrices,  functions, decomposition of complex problems, sequential
problem solving (not encouraging for parallel processing I guess).
Fortran, one hopes, would be a tool one uses to accomplish
science/engineering computing  with the least diversion from 
your primary purpose.  With the memory management structure Fortran 
currently has (perfectly understandable given its ancestary), it 
seems hard to call the language an unqualified success in this regard.
				   
        Scott|  ARPA:      lamson@ge-crd.arpa
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