On Sat, 2016-07-09 at 14:58 -0400, Vipul Parekh wrote:
> Unless and until the pace of change can be accelerated and newer and
> better features can be introduced quickly and made available, keep in
> mind this all appears rather moot for industry.
One reason for sloth is the small size of the Fortran committees. The
US ANSI/INCITS/PL22.3 committee, to which ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 has
delegated responsibility to develop revisions of the standard according
to requirements specified by WG5, has only nine members, five of whom
represent vendors whose principal interests are anti-trust protection
and limiting their workload increase. One vendor's recent interests
have been to convince other vendors to standardize their extensions.
One of the non-vendor members is keen to slow down development, so the
sentiment is roughly 6-3 against ambitious projects.
Another reason, of course, is that vendors have limited resources, and
difficult projects take longer than easier ones. Vendors respond to
their customers' expressed priorities, or what they guess their
customers' priorities are. Each vendor has different priorities, so
features appear in different orders in different processors. But if new
features don't appear in standards, they're exceedingly unlikely to
appear in any vendor's processor, and even if they appear in some
processor they might not appear in another one, and if they appear in
more than one they might well be different. This is unhelpful. I would
rather have ambitious new standards with customers' and vendors'
priorities setting the pace of development for each feature, rather than
having milquetoast ambitions, with useful new features postponed
indefinitely.
If you want the pace of change to accelerate, join the committees.
Contact John Reid <[log in to unmask]> for information about
participation in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5, which sets the requirements for
development of revisions of the Fortran standard.
Contact Dan Nagle <[log in to unmask]> for information about participation
in ANSI/INCITS/PL22.3, which develops revisions of the standard
according to requirements set by WG5.
I learned that it is essentially impossible to have any effect by remote
control. You need to participate in person.
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