Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: Fortran 8X Message-ID: <428@quintus.UUCP> Date: 19 Sep 88 01:33:58 GMT References: <3647@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <44400023@hcx9> Sender: news@quintus.UUCP Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc. Lines: 25 In article <44400023@hcx9> dougs2@hcx9.SSD.HARRIS.COM writes: >I agree. It seems most of the radical changes to Fortran proposed in X3J3 >can be placed in two categories: > o Those that make it easier for compiler writers > o Those that make Fortran a nice, simple, 'modern' language Since all of Fortran 77 remains in 8X, none of the changes can make it easier for compiler writers. One of the main complaints about 8X was that it looked like making life rather hard for those unfortunates. There are a lot of nice things in 8X, but the conglomeration is not simple. >One of the appeals of Fortran is that it is easily optimized. Since >there is no recursion, there is no stack to mess with. Variable space >may be allocated in the .text portion of the program. Simple variable >references are just that - simple. K=L is turned into move.l L,K rather >than move.l 4(sp),8(sp). That is not true on all machines (e.g. IBM /370s and imitations, where K=L turns into L temp,Loffset(BaseReg) unless the compiler has been able to ST temp,Koffset(BaseReg) bind K or L to a register) and not necessarily an advantage on the machines where it is true. While I was appalled by the complexity of Fortran 8X (or is "frightened" a better term?) there were a lot of things I liked (long names, internal subroutines, dynamic arrays, things we had in Algol 60 (:-)). What is happening to 8X?