I agree - people who want to discuss the idea of keeping Fortran but cleaning it up should at least take a serious look at F.
It seems to me that most full-Fortran front-ends could (rather easily?) have an option in their syntax analyzer to restrict input
code to the F subset (or a variation approved by some committee?). Or maybe better yet, just an option (during debugging?) to warn
the programmer when F subset syntax is violated. I got the impression that Lahey's "essential Fortran" (a slightly larger subset
than F, sometimes known as ELF) used a syntax analyzer that was based rather closely on the one for their full Fortran.
=
As for another question raised in this thread, "have any other languages in the meantime seriously addressed scientific
programming," the only one that comes to mind is ADA. It had a somewhat different charter, but still science-oriented one. Somebody
I once met (in the lunch room at a computer conference, as I recall), about the time the first ADA compilers were being released,
said ADA would never make it because some features of the language prevented it from ever being anywhere near as fast as Fortran for
a lot of essential jobs in its target domain.
This is only hearsay, of course. I'll bet Van Snyder and Richard Maine (and probably others on this list) have some actual data. Is
ADA still being seriously used?
= Loren P Meissner
-----Original Message-----
From: Fortran 90 List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alistair Mills
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 12:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Stir it up again? (was: Retire FORTRAN?!)
Hello
Have you looked at F? [...]
Alistair
Alistair Mills
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0118 989 2925
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