Jean Vezina wrote:

> ...

> But it is nevertheless true that Fortran 90 doesn't have the attention
> that it deserves and the F90 user community has to work hard in order
> to make it known.
>

All these discussions touch on good points, however I have not heard an
argument
pointing at the standard setting body, where, IMHO sits most of the blame
for
the very poor 'perception' that Fortran has today.

I see the situation thus: as other languages were being developed to meet
needs not fulfilled by Fortran, the Fortran standard body did not react
in a timely fashion to produce updates at the speed necessary to meet these
other languages head on, and not delegate Fortran to an also-ran language.

If (such a small word but so important), if every language update is 100%
compatible with previous versions, then the need to make only "big"
revisions
is not obvious to me.  Of course there are commercial interests not to do
incremental updates in the compilers, but that should not have stopped the
standards committee from issuing enhancements as required by the
programming community.  The market would then determine if the compiler
companies would issue updates to include the latest standard into their
compilers.

This method of keeping the language up to date with the latest computer
language technology development would have prevented such a quick
and strong switch from Fortran to the 'newer' languages.

Fortran 90/95 is a good step forward. It is late.  Is it irretrievable late?
The
answer is again in the hands of the standards committee, not with their
technology or creativity, but with their timing, their schedule.  The answer

also lies partly in the academic community, however, when all the chaff is
cleared from many discussions in this group, what remains are questions
and doubts of the capabilities of the language. If the answer to most
of these is 'wait another 7 years' then the result is quite predicable:
Fortran will not last long.

My wish is that Fortran become once again a common language, mainly
because of its elegance and power.

Fred Marton



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