From J.L.Schonfelder@liverpool.ac.uk Tue Mar 11 11:10:24 1997 Received: from pcmail.liv.ac.uk (pp@pcmail.liv.ac.uk [138.253.252.13]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id LAA29531 for ; Tue, 11 Mar 1997 11:10:18 +0100 Received: from jlspcnt [138.253.102.118] by pcmail.liv.ac.uk with smtp (Exim 1.61 #3) id 0w4OVK-0000XE-00; Tue, 11 Mar 1997 10:09:58 +0000 Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 10:09:27 GMT From: Lawrie Schonfelder Subject: Re: Fortran Conditional Compilation (fwd) To: SC22/WG5 members Message-ID: Priority: Normal MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII I am forwarding this as requested to this list. Forwarded Message: From: David Vallance Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 16:07:55 +0000 Subject: Re: Fortran Conditional Compilation To: Lawrie Schonfelder Lawrie, Dave Bailey has sent this note to me in response to a forwarding of your thoughts on CoCo. Could you please send it to the WG5 list. ------------------------ I am inclined to agree with the idea of omitting conditional compilation from the Fortran standard. In my view that standard is already too large, and other features are certain to increase its size further. Conditional compilation adds yet more complexity. All C/C++ programs which use conditional compilation extensively become ugly and unreadable. Once a feature becomes part of the language it will be used by programmers even when it is not really required, and the result will be less maintainable code. Just because conditional compilation is not part of the language does not mean that Fortran programmers cannot use the technique - they can use one of the several preprocessor programs which are available, or write something of their own. My concern about excessive language complexity extends to features other than conditional compilation. I am against the whole move to add object orientation to Fortran. Just as I have seen C code obscured by the use of the preprocessor facilities, I have seen some exceedingly obscure C++ code using the derived types and virtual functions available in that language. It is my impression that OOP creates a situation in which many programmers are less than sure what is happening as their code runs. The supporters of OOP usually posit a group of 'master programmers' who design the classes (in C++ terminology) that are then used by their less experienced colleagues. Master programmers, needless to say, write bug free code! In practice classes are often written by less exalted staff, and the resulting bugs can be very hard to find because so much activity happens implicitly (constructors, destructors, type conversion operators, etc.) Although there are individuals at Salford Software who disagree with these sentiments, the above represents the majority opinion amongst software developers and management here. Dave Bailey ----------------------------------------------- -- David M Vallance Managing Director Salford Software Ltd Tel: +44 (0) 161 834 2454 Adelphi House Fax: +44 (0) 161 834 2148 Adelphi Street WWW: http://www.salford.ac.uk/ssl/ss.html Salford, M3 6EN UK -- Dr.J.L.Schonfelder Director, Computing Services Department The University of Liverpool Liverpool, UK, L69 7ZF Phone: 44(151)794 3716 Fax: 44(151)794 3759