Third public review of X3J11 C (a scientist speaks up)

[Ian L. Kaplan]

In article <3732 at bsu-cs.UUCP> dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) writes:
>
>The real problem is not with C designers.  The real problem is with
>Fortran designers, who have always had an explicit mandate to design a
>language for scientific computing, and have continued to fail miserably
>to achieve this.  In a way the C users who do numerical computing want
>to put on C the burden that Fortran was supposedly designed to carry.

  The Fortran 8x committee has its problems, but lack of features is
not one of them.  The April '87 Fortran draft standard includes a
number of "modern programming language" features, including something
like structures (referred to as derived types) and modules, with
imports and exports.  The real problem with the Fortran
standardization process is the in ability of the Fortran community to
arrive at a standard.  The decade is almost over.  Soon it will be
Fortran 9x.

                           Ian Kaplan

"I don't know what the most popular numeric programming language will
 look like in the year 2000, but it will be named Fortran."

           These opinions are my own.