On Tue, 2025-01-14 at 22:43 +0000, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote: > On 1/14/25 14:03, Van Snyder via cctalk wrote: > > > Fortran 2025, the sixth edition, is rather different from 1956. > > F90 was a huge break from earlier versions; the target release date, > IIRC was supposed to be 1988, but there was a great amount of > negotiation. I was an alternate on our firm's representative to X3J3 > for vector extensions. I recall that, at one point, both IBM and DEC > threatened to walk out of X3J3 over the committee's not choosing to > use > VECTRAN syntax.
I corresponded with X3J3 starting in about 1980, but had no funding to participate officially. From 1997 until I retired in 2020, I was my employer's representative to J3, as INCITS renamed X3J3 when they took over from CBEMA, and then PL22.3, as they renamed it to correspond to ISO nomenclature. I was also my employer's representative to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5. I was liaison from J3/PL22.3 to WG9 (Ada), IEEE P1722 (interval arithmetic), and IFIP WG 2.5 (numerical software), of which I was vice-chair for about five years until I retired. > I haven't kept up with releases after F90, unfortunately. I can say > that F90 bears little resemblance to F77. F90 was an extension to F77 and was entirely upwardly compatible with it, not an entirely new language. The most important syntax extension was free-form input to get away from the rigid card-oriented format, but vector operations, dynamic memory, modules, etc. were also very important. Almost all of F66 and F77 are still present in F2025. The column-1 vertical format control was removed in 2003 because there was no way to detect or specify that it was enabled for a particular file. Assigned GO TO and assigned FORMAT and the ASSIGN statement were removed in 2008. A few things are marked as "obsolescent" with a caveat that they might be removed, but the vendors say "go ahead and remove it, but I still have to compile it forever." > > --Chuck >
