Jan van Oosterwijk writes:
> One thing I would have liked is the disappearance of the restriction
> of boz constants to DATA statements and INTEGERs ,
> though the use of for example, REAL(Z'abcd') is a work around.
A more liberal version allowing them to be used anywhere was passed
and was in one revision of the draft. However it was cut down to
the current one, which allows the above workaround. If I recall
correctly, this was because of
1. incompatabilities with existing vendor extensions. I recall
being a little surprised that this point wasn't raised when the
feature was added to the draft. Apparently many people either
hadn't seen the incompatabilities or hadn't realized how much
trouble they were likely to be. In any case, at the very the
next meeting, people came back with the quite strong input that
this was a big issue for several of the vendors (because there
was lots of code that depended on the extensions).
The extensions in question were essentially out of the question
for the standard as they involved major technical issues like
context dependence of expressions. I'm also not sure that all
vendor versions of the extension were even consistent. In any
case, just resolving this by adopting the extensions in question
wasn't viable.
2. There might have been some ambiguous cases. I don't recall for
sure. I'm pretty sure that item 1 above was the major reason.
By the way, for those on the list that might not have understood
from the implication, the workaround that Jan cites above is
allowed in the CD. That was basically the compromise that allowed
boz literals in a few more places to improve their utility without
getting into the morass that results when you try to allow them
everywhere.
--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
[log in to unmask] | experience comes from bad judgment.
| -- Mark Twain
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