Re: another way to shoot yourself in the foot?

[Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org>]

On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Richard Maine wrote:
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"Colin Paul Gloster <Colin_Paul_Gloster@ACM.org> wrote:                 |
|[a very long post including quite a lot of quotations of me, among      |
|others]                                                                 |
|                                                                        |
|I'm afraid that this post was too long and rambling for me to follow it.|
|I could not detect any coherent message in it, other than perhaps a hint|
|of randomly assembling quotes that sounded negative about Fortran (often|
|out of context, at least for some of mine)."                            |
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Dear Richard and everyone else,

I did not intentionally take quotes about Fortran out of
context. If you can spare the time, then please help me to learn
Fortran by explaining my misconceptions.

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|" In addition to preferring                                             |
|coherent organization and readability in my coding, I prefer the same in|
|newsgroup postings.                                                     |
|                                                                        |
|If you have some actual message that you are hoping I might respond to, |
|you'll have to state it a bit more coherently and concisely."           |
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Please find below a summary of most of that post posed as yes-or-no
questions. I have tried to rephrase
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------/
/"Gary Scott edited out all citations to newsgroup posts from circa 2007/
/which do not promote Fortran. Perhaps posters to                       /
/news:comp.lang.fortran would care to inform me as to whether or not    /
/they are valid..."                                                     /
/-----------------------------------------------------------------------/
"a bit more coherently and concisely."

|------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|" Decoding                                                              |
|that tome doesn't seem worth the work. If the message is just a general |
|language flame, which is perhaps the main flavor I hear, then you need  |
|not bother, as I won't respond, coherent or not."                       |
|------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I had looked at some Fortran newsgroup articles and webpages and code
in 2007, but I have only started in a Fortran project this year. I
have started to read a Fortran book for the first time this week. The
Fortran project which I have joined so far involves replacing Fortran
with C++. This had begun before I have joined. I do not approve of
replacing Fortran with C++. However, if Ada is better than Fortran,
then I approve of replacing Fortran and C++ with Ada. So, please
rectify any misconceptions which I may have. (Later, if Fortran
compilers produce much faster executables, then I may be motivated to
use some Fortran even if I shall still believe then that Ada is a
better language overall.)

I did point out in the long post that Ada is not perfect with respect
to all of these flaws.

If answers differ with respect to different versions of Fortran
(e.g. 77; 90; 95; 2003; 2008; and any others worth considering), then
please elaborate accordingly...

Does Fortran have undefined behavior?

Does Fortran always automatically check if the INTERFACE actually
corresponds to the code?

Does Fortran statically forbid out-of-bounds array accesses at
compilation time?

Does Fortran allow argument mismatch?

Are Fortran 90 modules compatible at the binary level on the same
architecture?

Does Fortran have an exception mechanism?

Are "there are a number of things the Fortran standard leaves
unspecified that it should pin down"?

Does Fortran allow one to declare a type such as
type
The_Resolution_For_Nanoteslas_Supported_By_My_Analog_To_Digital_Converter
is delta 1.0 / 2.0**5 range - 256.0 .. + 256.0 - 1 .0 / 2.0**5;
(that is in Ada syntax, but I am not worried about the syntax: the
feature is important, not how it is expressed)?

Does Fortran guarantee what happens during overflow for signed and
unsigned integers?

Could Fortran 90 allocatables be left in an undefined state?

Does Lahey's implementation of TR 15581 contain a bug which leaks
memory?

Do the Fortran standards require detection of only trivial errors?

Is an optional garbage collector buggy?

In principle FORALL should be good, but Fortran implementations
thereof seem to be bad. Is this due to a flaw in the definition of
Fortran itself?

Does Fortran allow one to use an undefined variable?

Does Fortran allow a default value at the declaration of a variable?

Yours sincerely,
Colin Paul Gloster