Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!sdd.hp.com!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!jato!vsnyder
From: vsnyder@jato.jpl.nasa.gov (Van Snyder)
Subject: Re: Our favorite language
Message-ID: <1991Apr5.175526.15598@jato.jpl.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: vsnyder@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Van Snyder)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
References: <16149@chaph.usc.edu>
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 91 17:55:26 GMT

In article <16149@chaph.usc.edu>, echeverr@sal-sun8.usc.edu (The Black Sheep) writes:
>
> Excuse me, but is it just me, or is fortran a language so old it is becoming
> obsolescent?	Really, i just can't handle doing programs while tripping over
> small details and phantom errors from nowhere and tricky compilations and
> core dump after core dump after execution...

and lots of folks have since responded with various apologies for Fortran.

Isn't it interesting that the "experts" have been criticizing Fortran since
1956, and it STILL hasn't gone away?  The problem is, the "experts" who
design alternatives don't know what's needed for _Computing_.  Sure,
Fortran doesn't have records or recursion.  But Pascal and Modula-2 don't
have open arrays or generic intrinsic functions.  And C, until recently
standardized by ANSI, coerced all intermediate floating point expressions
to double precision; C still lacks generic intrinsic functions.  With Fortran
90 having records and recursion, AND array processing, the "modern" languages
touted as alternatives by the "experts" seem to be falling further behind.

I've criticized Fortran 90 because it's not all it should be, but I don't
see any REAL alternatives for _Computing_.

It's interesting that Guy L. Steele, Jr., the main designer of Scheme (an
especially clean Lisp-like language), and the editor of "Common Lisp, the
Language", editions 1 and 2, is presenting a paper "Compiling Fortran at
10 Gigaflops" at the upcoming SIGPLAN conference on Programming Language
Design and Implementation.
-- 
vsnyder@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov
ames!elroy!jato!vsnyder
vsnyder@jato.uucp
