psmith@mozart.uucp (Presley Smith) (10/19/88)
This is a second posting of the same article. It appeared that the last portion some bytes got shuffled in the original posting. Sorry. In article <2045@unmvax.unm.edu> brainerd@unmvax.unm.edu (Walt Brainerd) writes: Let us explore this a bit: >Another point I forgot to mention previously (the significance of which >you can puzzle over for yourself) in response to someone who noted that >the Europeans seem to represent the consumer viewpoint more than X3J3: I don't believe that the European's public comment represent the consumer viewpoint any more than the U.S. public comments represents the consumer viewpoint. What are the facts... 1. The Europeans were invited to a series of "FORTRAN Forums." These Forums presented the positive side of the FORTRAN 8x standard and pumped up the users to respond to "get the standard out...without delay." There are many of these comments in the European response. In fact, I could list the particular comment numbers here, but I will not. I don't believe that any of these Forums discussed the information that was presented in the Steve Rowan's article that was posted on the net today, also. I don't believe these Forums discussed that FORTRAN 8x is actually bigger than Ada, that with dependent compilation, compilers will run much slower, and that implementation of some of the new constructs of FORTRAN 8x would cause major compiler efforts because they don't fit really well with the old FORTRAN constructs. I'll bet that not a one of these Forums discussed the amount of time it took to get FORTRAN 77 implemented on the majority of the machines in the world and how much more complex FORTRAN 8x is to implement. 2. In the U.S. various groups received a more balanced set of information. Presentations presented the new features, benefits of each, and the drawbacks of each. Discussions did not center around the "beauty" of the "modern FORTRAN" language, but around how it would help the user and how it would hurt the user. In the U.S. we also discussed how it would be more complex for an engineer to pick up this 8x language quickly (one would need a better computer science background...) and issues of sustaining programs that were created with a mixture of FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 8x constructs... In Europe, many of the presenters of the Forums were users that were in favor of making FORTRAN a "modern language" that would "compete" with other languages like Ada and Pascal. In the U.S. most presentations were made by the Vendors. The ones that must support the FORTRAN user base and provide quality products for their use. It seems strange that the major vendors: IBM, DEC, and UNISYS all said "NO" to FORTRAN 8x. Has anyone really looked at the why? It's spelled out in their ballot comments on FORTRAN 8x, but many tend to ignore those and claim that the vendors just don't want to implement a new FORTRAN. Take a look at those ballot comments... >The document favored by ISO/WG5 was put into its final form by five >people on X3J3 who all represent users; the hardest opposition is >coming from some of the vendors. Your are right, the hardest opposition is coming from the vendors. They believe that FORTRAN 8x is too big, too complex, has too many "neat" things that are not needed or wanted by their user base. They also understand that it will take years to produce quality FORTRAN compilers for a standard this complex. It's real simple. If you don't get the vendors to sign up to producing compilers and supporting those compilers, NO new standard will be successful. It's ALGOL 68 again. A beautiful language that none of the major vendors implemented. That could have a lot to do with why we are still programming in FORTRAN and not ALGOL 68. The other problem with this statement is that "five people on X3J3" put together this ISO/WG5 document from documents that had NOT been accepted by X3J3 at the last X3J3 meeting as being acceptable for a base document for the new FORTRAN standard. In fact, the delegation from X3J3 to the WG5 meeting was directed by X3J3 NOT to support this document as a base for the new FORTRAN standard. And now "five people on X3J3" are putting this document, that was rejected at the last X3J3 meeting, into final form. I don't believe this "five people on X3J3" have been operating on the instructions of X3J3 to produce this document. >From the votes at the last X3J3 meeting and the direction from X3, it is unclear that X3J3 or X3 would authorize this work. One other thing to note. ANY document given to any ISO/SC/WG organization must be passed through X3 per the procedures specified in the SD-2. If this document is not processed properly, major international problems may result.