Back to some history:
I joined the faculty at Univ of San Francisco in 1982, when Fortran (66) was still going strong in the academic world, and it was
the only programming language being taught in the USF CS Dept at that time. USF still wasn't seriously aware of F77; implementations
were barely starting to appear. PC's had been invented but weren't yet being taken seriously as a teaching tool.
Before we knew it, CS departments (including USF) were swept off their feet by the new "perfect" academic language, Pascal, which
permitted us to teach IMPORTANT CS CONCEPTS like STRUCTURED PROGRAMMING and RECURSION. (Pascal was also rather nicely scaled for the
tiny PCs, as they emerged.) It wasn't until a few years later that we discovered Pascal did NOT permit us to teach OTHER IMPORTANT
CS CONCEPTS like INFORMATION HIDING. (The way you share data in Pascal is by making it global.)
The academics were very busy singing the praises of Pascal (and how much better it was than F66). They never bothered to notice that
F77 had overcome several of the main (CS-wise) disadvantages of F66. By the time they woke up, F77 was already becoming obsolete,
and the scandalous political foot-dragging (from which F90 finally emerged, way too late) was going on. Meanwhile C had become the
hot language de jour. Academically, Fortran never recovered from all these developments of the 1980s.
The subsets (Lahey and F) were a valiant attempt at an academically respectable Fortran, and they achieved some success, but most of
Academia had already been so badly poisoned against Fortran that the subsets were never really given the chance they deserved.
Already in the mid 80s, some computer trade magazine phoned me (as editor of Fortran Forum) to ask what I thought of "the future of
Fortran," which had been the subject of many of my FF editorials. I said I thought its RELATIVE market share had decreased but there
was so much more computing going on in the world that the amount of Fortran code being written and executed was still more than it
had ever been. Now somebody said much the same 20 years later in this week's thread.
= Loren P Meissner
-----Original Message-----
From: Fortran 90 List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Walt Brainerd
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 3:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Retire FORTRAN?!
Jing Guo wrote:
> Richard Maine wrote:
>
>> On Feb 19, 2004, at 5:41 PM, Jing Guo wrote:
>
> What if the petition was meant to retire FORTRAN features
> from Fortran 2003 or later? Would that make any difference?
> Anyway, that was how I interpret the petition by reading
> the statements.
I didn't read it that way. I assumed he wants J3 to disband
(not that that would necessarily cause Fortran to go away).
> I can see how certain implementation of "retiring FORTRAN"
> may stop many people's work. Other implementations may not.
> For instance, isn't F another attempt to "retiring FORTRAN",
> in a less dramatic way?
If you mean in the sense I think the petition meant it--I
certainly hope not. F is meant to *promote* Fortran. If
you mean it might help retire certain crusty old features,
then certainly, yes.
--
Walt Brainerd +1-877-355-6640 (voice & fax)
The Fortran Company +1-520-760-1397 (outside USA)
6025 N. Wilmot Road [log in to unmask]
Tucson, AZ 85750 USA http://www.fortran.com
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