In reply to:

> His article "Does OO sync with the way we think?" gives one cause to wonder
> whether object-oriented programming support should have been put into Fortran.
> But Hatton does go on to say that the only OO framework he has studied in
> enough detail to quantify things is C++, and he's not sure whether the
> problems he's identified are caused by the OO paradigm, or its implementation
> in C++.  I think the Simula model followed in Fortran is much better than
> the C++ model, so maybe Fortran 2000 will come out better than C++ in some
> future edition of Hatton's work.

Dear Van and members of the list,

I just want to point out, that C++ is poorly designed as an OO language,
and Eiffel is probably one of the best designed OO languages:

A good read on this issue is Ian Joyner's critique of C++
http://www.elj.com/cppcv3/

So I agree that one has to be careful on which OO features will be added
to Fortran.

Another issue, but that is related:

I *was* programming a big project in Fortran 95, and then got fed up with
Fortran95's interaction with MPICH (a library originally written in
C), and the difficulty with linking with libraries like LibXML, GNU
scientific library, etc... which forced me to encapsulate a part of my
project in Fortran95 and then do the rest of the work in C (Having a
boundary API of 3 or 4 function calls).

This case story  just tells about the importance of adding
INTEROPERABILITY to Fortran: most of modern UNIX libraries are written in
other languages, so living isolated in a Fortran world is a big price to
pay. 

-- 

Alan Aspuru-Guzik                    Dios mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza.
(510)642-5911 UC Berkeley           ¿Qué Dios detrás de Dios la trama empieza
(925)422-8739 LLNL                de polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías? -Borges