From meissner@lynx.cs.usfca.edu Wed Mar 18 17:46:43 1992
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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 92 08:45:20 -0800
From: meissner@lynx.cs.usfca.edu (Loren P. Meissner)
Message-Id: <9203181645.AA15796@lynx.cs.usfca.edu>
To: sc22wg5%dkuug.dk@ion
Subject: Another tangent
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Just to toss another irrelevant fly into the ointment:
 what about "the Fortran user community"?
 Clearly the F.U.C. has changed A LOT since "77".  Then (as since 1960, say)
F was the predominant general purpose language.  Clearly Pascal has taken over
one big segment of that market, and C has taken over another.  Maybe some
others like ADA have picked up a share.  I include C++ with C.  And I have
been hearing about the "revival" of Basic.
 What is left to Fortran in this decade is the BIG scientific market.
 In that light, the (pre)"dominance" of the Energy community does not seem
so strange.
 Do we count "the majority of Fortran users" or do we count machine cycles or
MIPS-hours (whatever the units should be)?  Let every Fortran machine-second
have a vote, and Energy's representation on X3J3 might not seem so biased.
 At the other end, if we count "users", is every student in my class a "user"
--- even one who writes a total of 6 - 100 line nearly trivial programs in
the semester?  Should we have one X3J3 member for every N Fortran programming
students?
 Something to think about: if X3J3 should be "representative", what should it
represent?  Some people want an X3J3 member for every billion dollars of
"investment" in Fortran (dusty decks? new codes since NAGWARE F90?)
???
--Loren