> My personal feelings about the whole development of FORTRAN over the years
> is that all standard functionaly should continue to supported through the
> various stages: IV->77->90->2000. The language is being developed for the
> use of the programmers and not for the compiler writers. It may be a
> nuisance for compiler writers to continue to support "obsolete" features but
> it's an even greater hassle for programmers to have to rewrite software
> which has been working well for years.
My impression is that it is actually easier for them to leave it in than
to take it out. Also, there are enough users who need the
backward-compatibility. The same applies to non-standard features.
However (and this gets back to my `standardised subset' idea), the
downside of this is that NEW code, i.e. people whose first programming
language is F95, is often written badly, using extensions and standard
but no-longer-needed features.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|