Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!decwrl!sun!chiba!khb
From: khb%chiba@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Standardization (of FORTRAN, Ada, e
Message-ID: <79265@sun.uucp>
Date: 29 Nov 88 20:14:15 GMT
References: <311@csun1.UUCP> <50500092@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
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In article <50500092@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
> ** stuff about interlanguage calling
>
>>DEC demonstrates that this can be done in the VAX/VMS family of programming
>>languages (although this is a private DEC standard).

As did UNIVAC, CDC, etc. years before DEC.
>
>And all the Microsoft languages (Basic, C, Fortran, and Pascal) can
>easily call each other. 

MS has come a long way from the old Z80 days...but back then the
documentation said it was easy (and explained how), but actually
calling BASIC from FORTRAN from COBOL and similar stunts nearly always
failed. Incompatible libraries (MS supplied) were the root cause.

>
>>What does the rest of the net think?
>
>I think it is a great idea. Unfortunately, when I have proposed it
>to our member on X3J3, Kurt Hirchert, he has given it the royal cold
>shoulder. X3J3 at least doesn't want to have anything to do with
>other languages. They are only interested in making the "perfect"
>Fortran, in and of itself (*), not in helping the poor user get at other
>languages, or even those parts of the operating system that
>aren't covered by the rather limiting Fortran IO system.

I suspect that Kurt and crew DO care. The problem is that it is not an
X3J3 issue. If someone wants to set up a committee for interlanguage
issues, which will then interface with the language committees I'm
sure something could be worked out. At this point the technical (what
objects are "basic" how should they be handled ? etc.) issues are
non-trivial, and the political ones are really pretty big (it is hard
to get agreement JUST on a language ... much less get committees of
comittess to agree). 

Ultimate we can hope/expect this evolution, but computers are still
pretty young.

> Both DEC
>and Microsoft have shown that it can be done - and as best as I can
>tell both methods would work for either one (except that Microsoft
>would have to add some way to take care of DEC's hideous "descriptors" -
>better DEC to rid itself of them).

Your examples "prove" that a single vendor can do it (btw: dec's
descriptors are quite useful for resolving interlingual issues, better
MS adopt the dec solution) but given the total non-portability this
introduces into your code is this really a good idea ?
>
>By the way, how is poor F9x? Still in intensive care? Any report, Kurt?
>Are they ever going to reply to our comments sent in a year ago?

There have been numerous postings about F88 over the last few months.
WG5 has ordained it, subject to some modest changes. Since WG5 voted
to accept the existing document (modulo changes) this year, it chose
to call the standard by this years handle. So we have a new
international standard.

The american standard will lag a bit (counter-intuitive, since x3j3
wrote the document WG5 accepted ... but that's the way it goes).






Keith H. Bierman
It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus