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Richard Maine wrote: > On Feb 19, 2004, at 5:41 PM, Jing Guo wrote: > >> A friend of mine pointed me to the following website: >> >> "PETITION TO RETIRE FORTRAN" >> I wonder what people on this list think about those statements. > > > I mostly think it is a bunch of uninformed whining not worth > replying to in detail... so I won't. As someone else said, what > does "retire Fortran" mean? Particularly as it is allegedly > addressed at J3. Is J3 supposed to send a goon squad after everyone > that continues using the language? 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 interperate the petition by reading the statements. > > And whatever it means, what purpose would this allegedly achieve? > Stopping other people from getting work done? 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? > I see nobody forcing > the author to use Fortran. As far as I know, some of those who signed the petition are FORTRAN/Fortran programmers. They probably favor Fortran 90 and later much more than the traditional FORTRAN, except its troublesome growning complexity. > I'm always very leery of people who go > on crusades whose sole purpose is to force other people to do or > not do something that has no obvious effect on the crusader... but > I veer dangerously close to current US political issues here. :-( > > No, I see nothing here worth discussing. My disagreements with the > material aside, this is nothing put a publicly posted whine. I certainly agree it is whining. But people do whining when they get headacke. :-) > And I note > that it has no options for discussion or anything - just sign your > name or not. If the author actually thinks this has any constructive > use, then I'd say he is as misinformed about matters other than just > Fortran. What I can tell is, instead of continuing on the great FORTRAN vs. C debate, we are seeing more and more FORTRAN vs. Fortran 90/95 conflicts between FORTRAN and Fortran 90/95 developers (I know Fortran 90/95 includes FORTRAN, but you know what I mean). For example, a piece of modernized Fortran 90 software can be quickly corrupted or bottlenecked by implementations using bad FORTRAN features. Jing > > -- > Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience; > [log in to unmask] | experience comes from bad judgment. > | -- Mark Twain > -- ** Any opinion expressed is my own and not that of NASA. ** ________________________________ _-__-_-_ _-___--- _____________________ Jing Guo, [log in to unmask], (301)614-6172(o), (301)614-6297(fx) Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, Code 900.3, NASA/GSFC Greenbelt, MD 20771