wsb@boise.Eng.Sun.COM (Walt Brainerd) (11/30/90)
In article <1990Nov26.171823.4008@isc.rit.edu>, jav8106@ritvax.isc.rit.edu (Doctor FORTRAN) writes: > FORTRAN IV (sometimes referred to as FORTRAN 66) in order to satisfy market Fortran IV is an IBM product; Fortran 66 is (was) the first programming language standard on this planet. They are similar, but certainly not identical. Picky point, perhaps, but a Doctor of Fortran should know :) > demand. It finally reached the point when the extensions were so numerous that > a revision of the standard was prudent. The proposed 9X standard evolved from > the existing 77 standard in the same way. This is an accurate characterization of the development of Fortran 77, but very definitely not of Fortran 90. Over the past 15 years, vendors have been very conservative about adding extensions (I am not saying this is bad), hence X3J3 had to take a more active role in development. This is one thing that has made Fortran 90 appear to some to be a more radical change. And possibly explains some of the resistance to it by some vendors. This goes back to the latter part of the development of Fortran 77. The only reason my proposal to put the block IF into the language was accepted is because something like it was found in most of the dozens of preprocessors available. Almost no compilers had such a radical extension. -- Walt Brainerd Sun Microsystems, Inc. wsb@eng.sun.com MS MTV 5-40 Mountain View, CA 94043 415/336-5991