From walt@swcp.com Sun Feb 26 02:22:08 1995 Received: from kitsune.swcp.com by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA25543 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Sun, 26 Feb 1995 17:19:41 +0100 Received: (from walt@localhost) by kitsune.swcp.com (8.6.9/8.6.9) id JAA15411 for SC22WG5@dkuug.dk; Sun, 26 Feb 1995 09:22:08 -0700 Date: Sun, 26 Feb 1995 09:22:08 -0700 From: Walt Brainerd Message-Id: <199502261622.JAA15411@kitsune.swcp.com> To: SC22WG5@dkuug.dk Subject: F9? X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 After reading all the discussion created by John Prentice's letter on comp.lang.fortran, it seems clear to me that the two most important issues for these people are: o interfacing with window systems o interoperability, particularly with C/C++ And all the discussion just before that about IEEE arithmetic and exceptions shows that one is important also. If I am not mistaken, these were the three items on Jerry's slide at the Houston meeting. [Well, I am pretty sure I got 2 out of 3 right, anyway.] Of course, we need to keep improving the "smaller" aspects of the language, but it looks like those are the really important things to try to address as soon as possible. When we started working on Fortran 90, Marty Greenfield said he thought things like inter- language issues were more important than (at least as important as?) adding a bunch of new features. Fortran 77 was far enough behind that it was essential to add these things to keep it going, but now maybe we can address these concerns.