How does one "retire" a language, anyway? No more compilers built past f95?
Alvaro Fernandez
-----Original Message-----
From: Fortran 90 List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Craig Dedo
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2004 9:46 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Retire FORTRAN?!
Jing Guo wrote:
> A friend of mine pointed me to the following website:
>
> "PETITION TO RETIRE FORTRAN"
>
> http://www.fortranstatement.com
>
> Being a long time Fortran developer for scientific computing, I
> think those statements make a lot of sense, although I am not
> sure I will sign the petition.
>
> I wonder what people on this list think about those statements.
I took a little time tonite to go to the Web site with the petition,
read the 10 complaints against "FORTRAN2003", and think thru the
supposed reasons in support of each complaint. I don't have the time
now or in the next few weeks to respond to these arguments in detail,
but here are a few preliminary thoughts, in no particular order of
importance.
1. The author of the petition, a Jace A. Mogill, has some recent
experience in high-powered parallel computation in the last few years.
I don't know how nuch of it is in Fortran; his resume does not provide
that information.
2. I noticed that he mis-spelled the name of the language. by
official ruling of the ISO, Fortran is a proper noun, **NOT** an
acronym. It has been this way since the publication of Fortran 90 in
1991. So Jace is 13 years behind the times on this point.
3. The reasons that Jace gives in support of each of his complaints
contain a large number of highly erroneous implicit assumptions. These
implicit assumptions are very powerful and form the foundation of his
entire case.
4. Exposing these implicit assumptions and demolishing them will
require a significant amount of work. Thus, it will require some time
for one or more capabile persons to do the work and make the results
abvailable.
5. From some meager information on his Web site, it appears that
for some unstated reasons, Jace prefers C and its derivatives, e.g., C++
and Java. The source code that he has available on the Web site is
written in C. This raises the possibility that he could be a C bigot.
6. Jace ignores the role of Political Correctness in his complaints
about the availability of opportunities to learn Fortran.
7. Jace does not mention how much of his time programming in
Fortran was in the modern variants of the language (F90, F95, and F95
with F2003 features). Much of his Web site's information appears tilted
toward F77.
--
Sincerely,
Craig T. Dedo
17130 W. Burleigh Place E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Brookfield, WI 53005-2759 Voice Phone: (262) 783-5869
USA Fax Phone: (262) 783-5928
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
(1759)
