Unix, Fortran and the meaning of life

[Barry Shein]

This seems to be coming up in several different contexts and I
think the problem is that the world has changed drastically in
the last year or two while some of the attitudes have not:

UNIX IS NOW AN HIGHLY SUPPORTED PRODUCT. You don't have to run
a research version anymore if you don't want to. I know there are still
lotsa little problems, but reading this discussion about how SUN, DEC
and ATT have cleaned up things like Fortran (or, in the case of DEC,
replaced it entirely with their very good [give or take compatibility]
VMS fortran) it is clear that a lot of old users are rapidly getting
out of date. Other companies like Alliant are also doing a lot of
internal development on things like their compilers.

Look, if you want the old cheapo/fun research version for a few hundred
dollars, you can expect some bugs and to have your system reflect the
interests of the researchers who developed the software (F77 from a
4.2bsd tape), if you need higher quality in that arena, shop for it,
if you don't want to pay extra, well, if it isn't important to you
then why should it be important to us :-)

We are right now seeing massive evolution in this area, I think its
almost impossible to make any blanket statement about things like
language compilers 'available under UNIX'. The problem is that you
may have to exchange your hardware to get back into the loop you
really want to be in, but you knew things like that were going to
happen sooner or later anyhow (I mean, are you really going to complain
about the lack of serious fortran development on PDP11s!? Then again,
maybe it's the only machine that's old enough to remember how :-)

	-Barry Shein, Boston University