Pierre Hugonnet wrote:
> And I just blame Microsoft for introducing such a confusing choice in
their
> PowerStation. Simply stupid.
Microsoft can be blamed for many things, but not the use of "." as a field
separator. DEC invented that syntax, along with STRUCTURE/RECORD, back in
1984, long before what was then called "Fortran 88" had settled down. We
deliberately picked a notation that we were sure would not be standardized,
as if we had tried to look ahead, we most likely would have been burned by
changes in semantics, as we were when we included the then-proposed
no-parentheses PARAMETER syntax in our FORTRAN 66 compilers. The idea was
that we could support both our syntax and whatever eventually became
standardized. In this we were largely successful, and users got access to a
very useful feature a decade before Fortran 90 compilers became widespread.
Steve Lionel
Compaq (formerly Digital) and Intel Fortran Engineering
Intel Corporation
Nashua, NH
|