usenet@nlm-mcs.arpa (usenet news poster) (03/28/90)
A couple of questions regarding Fortran8X / Fortran90 standards: 1) Is the use of the lower case alphabet included? Other extended alphabet characters in symbol names? 2) What is the limit on the length of symbol names? 3) Are there intrinsic functions defined to handle interaction with the user/command environment (the equivalent of C getarg, iargc, getenv)? 4) Is there a standard inter-language interface defined (Fortran/C in particular)? 5) Is a draft of the current standards available via the net? David States
hirchert@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Kurt Hirchert) (03/28/90)
In article <11770@nlm-mcs.arpa> states@tech.nlm.nih.gov (David States) writes: >A couple of questions regarding Fortran8X / Fortran90 standards: > >1) Is the use of the lower case alphabet included? >Other extended alphabet characters in symbol names? Processors are not required to support lower case, but if they do, they are required to treat it as equivalent to the corresponding upper case letter. Thus, write and WRITE are the same keyword; XYZ, xyz, and Xyz are the same symbolic name. Underscores are allowed in names, but not as the first character (just like the treatment of digits). > >2) What is the limit on the length of symbol names? 31 characters > >3) Are there intrinsic functions defined to handle interaction with >the user/command environment (the equivalent of C getarg, iargc, getenv)? No. (Note, however, that the standard allows for standard modules. The Fortran binding to Posix does include such procedures and would be a likely candidate for being a standard module.) > >4) Is there a standard inter-language interface defined >(Fortran/C in particular)? No. (The Fortran committee doesn't have the authority to do this unilaterally. The standard includes features which could be the "hook" for such a feature, but the definition of such a feature will have to come from one of the committees charged with working on inter-language communication.) > >5) Is a draft of the current standards available via the net? No, not as far as I know. A fairly recent draft was published by ACM Fortran Forum. I believe that any newer drafts have been distributed only within X3J3 and WG5. I suppose that the differences document could be distributed on the net, but that would be worthless unless you have a copy of the draft it's based on. > > David States -- Kurt W. Hirchert hirchert@ncsa.uiuc.edu National Center for Supercomputing Applications
jerry@heyman.austin.ibm.com (Jerrold Heyman) (03/28/90)
In this months issue of "Personal Workstations" (April 1990, pages 16-20), a brief overview of the new changes to FORTRAN are described. Now the changes listed are not comprehensive, but they give a good 'flavor' of what to expect. The author also mentions the possibility of conflict between the ANSI X3 committee and the SC22/WG5 because of ANSI's voting on having coexisting standards - the Fortran 77 and the new Fortran 8x. Jerry Heyman IBM AWD, Austin