From martin@ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov Wed Dec 16 06:24:33 1992 Received: from ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov ([134.9.48.4]) by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA04379 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Wed, 16 Dec 1992 23:24:33 +0100 Received: by ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov (4.1/SMI-4.0) id AA02400; Wed, 16 Dec 92 14:24:33 PST Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 14:24:33 PST From: martin@ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov (Jeanne Martin) Message-Id: <9212162224.AA02400@ocfmail.ocf.llnl.gov> To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: Letter to Editor-in-Chief of "Computer Standards & Interfaces" X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 To: WG5 From: Jeanne Martin Subject: Letter to Editor-in-Chief of "Computer Standards & Interfaces" Today I sent the attached letter. Perhaps if several of you protested his remarks by sending letters, it would have some impact. _____________________________________________________________________________ December 16, 1992 John L. Berg FutureTech, Inc. P.O. Box 298 Long Lake, MN 55356 Dear John L. Berg: I must take issue with a statement you made in your Editorial in the December 1992 issue of Computer Standards & Interfaces 14 (1992) 361: "COBOL and FORTRAN continue advancing on a relatively boring straight-line extrapolation of the past. It would seem all their impact is behind them." As you are no doubt aware, a new international Fortran standard was published in July 1991 and adopted in the US in 1992. It is familiarly known as Fortran 90 to distinguish it from previous Fortran standards: Fortran 77 and Fortran 66. Here is what someone who has not been associated with either SC22/WG5 or X3J3, Dr. John Prentice (john@aquarius.unm.edu), of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico, says about the new standard: "As for Fortran 90, X3J3 did a good job of producing a modern dialect of Fortran which compares well with every other conventional programming language. But unlike virtually every other language out there, Fortran is an evolving language. Fortran 77 was a major change from Fortran 66, with new programming ideas incorporated into it. Fortran 90 is an even more radical evolution. Work is now going on for the next version of Fortran and what goes into it will be a function of what the user community demands. Certainly, I would expect Fortran xx to encorporate support of data parallelizm, perhaps control parallelism, and who knows, perhaps even OOPS. What other language is making those kinds of evolutionary strides, and doing so in the context of international standards which preserve code portability across large numbers of computers? The ANSI version of C, for example, did nothing more than clean up some of the worst deficiencies of the original C, it introduced very little that was new. So my point is, you can trash on Fortran for not being a forefront language, and you would be largely correct. But you also have to give it great credit for being the most dynamic of the major languages (by which I mean languages in which people actually write large programs), one which is contuously improving and evolving." (sic) At Supercomputing '92 in Minneapolis, MN (Nov, 16-20, 1992), the High Performance Fortran Forum headed by Dr. Ken Kennedy of Rice University presented the HPF extensions to Fortran 90 that will be used by every major vendor of supercomputers. HPFF is made of representatives of 33 universities, laboratories, computer manufacturers, and research organizations worldwide. They chose Fortran 90 on which to build their language. Certainly this does not suggest that the "impact of Fortran is behind it". I cannot personally speak for COBOL, but I do know that there are very interesting efforts underway to modernize that language. As far as Fortran is concerned, I believe you owe an apology and a retraction in your next editorial. Certainly you do no service to the dedicated individuals who produce state-of-the-art standards by claiming their work is a "boring straight-line extrapolation of the past". I should think that, in your position, you would have more respect for the goals of standards production. In my opinion, your comments were totally out of line. Sincerely, Jeanne Martin, Convenor ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 - Fortran L-300 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Livermore, CA 94550 jtm@llnl.gov