naparst@cartan.Berkeley.EDU (Harold Naparst) (01/29/88)
We have had some nice flames against Fortran 8x now. There was even a
sample letter on this newsgroup. That was nice. I want complete information.
Assume that I am not going to buy the standard for $50 or the other little
explanations. Could someone explain all the changes concisely, please? Just
a couple of sentences for each change. Don't tell me about deprecated features.
Just the new statements. Then I can write my letter to X3.
Personally, all I want for Fortran 8x is: Repeat, while, include, and
dynamic memory memory allocation (which I suppose means pointers). I plan
to tell X3 this, but I want to kill the other changes eloquently. So please
post a little description of each change.
Harold Naparst
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ARPA | CSNET naparst%cartan@berkeley.eduhirchert@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (02/04/88)
It has been suggested that we "explain Fortran 8x completely" in this forum. X3J3 produced a "short" description of 8x (published by SIGNUM and SIGPLAN) in 1984. It was 42 pages long. Condensing that information enough to fit in a news article is just not reasonable. I imagine that that report is still available from ACM (SIGNUM Newsletter volume 19 number 3 or FORTEC Forum volume 3 number 2), although there have been some significant changes in the last 4 years. If you don't want to spend the $50 for the proposed standard, may I suggest spending $20 for Fortran 8x Explained by Metcalf & Reid (Oxford University Press). The authors are both members of X3J3 and they delayed publication until the proposed draft was frozen in order to avoid being wrong about last minute changes, so I think you would find this an accurate description of what is in the proposed standard. Kurt W. Hirchert National Center for Supercomputing Applications