Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!columbia!cubsun!shenkin
From: shenkin@cubsun.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU (Peter Shenkin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: (none)
Message-ID: <72@cubsun.BIO.COLUMBIA.EDU>
Date: 16 Aug 88 13:00:33 GMT
References: <651@<8052> <50500064@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: shenkin@cubsun.UUCP (Peter Shenkin)
Organization: Dept. of Biology, Columbia Univ., New York, NY
Lines: 23

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.

Well, I'm not an 8x fan, but in fairness, the same criticism could be
leveled at fortran 77, which also listed a number of deprecated features
which "should/could" disappear in the 8x version.  I don't have the
standard here, but one of the features which was supposed to disappear was 
signifying a comment by a C in the first column.  The "right" way to do 
this under the 77 standard is to use an asterisk in the first column.

Nobody took this too seriously, and the features didn't go away, and the
features that 8x deprecates probably won't go away in 9x, either.  There are 
lots more important aspects of 8x to argue over than this red herring.
(And there seems to be no dearth of folks willing to argue....).

	-P.
-- 
*******************************************************************************
Peter S. Shenkin,    Department of Biological Sciences,    Columbia University,
New York, NY   10027         Tel: (212) 280-5517 (work);  (212) 829-5363 (home)
shenkin@cubsun.bio.columbia.edu    shenkin%cubsun.bio.columbia.edu@cuvmb.BITNET