FORTRAN vs. Fortran (was: November 5th is Clang-Day)

[Steve Kargl]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 08:25:58AM +0000, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 2 Nov 2012, at 08:18, Mehmet Erol Sanliturk wrote:
> 
> > Very many years ago , when 2010 was a very distant future , I do not
> > remember the name of the writer , who wrote approximately :
> > 
> > "In 2010 , there will be Fortran , but a Fortran which may be different ."
> 
> I remember a talk in the mid '90s by someone from Sun's HPC team
> where he said 'I don't know what the syntax or semantics of the
> language we will be using for HPC in 20 years time will be, but
> I do know one thing about it: it will be called Fortran'
> 
> Although the response to GCC's recent decision to drop support
> for Fortran 77 showed that that language will probably be called Fortran 77...
> 

GCC did not drop Fortran 77.  When GCC moved from the 3.x series
to the 4.x series, it introduced the use of gimple and tree-ssa.
No one ported g77 to use gimple and tree-ssa, so g77 was replaced
by a completely new frontend, which is called gfortran and started
life as a Fortran 95 compiler.  One admirable objective of J3, the
Fortran standardization committee, is that it strives for backwards
compatibility to previous standards.  So, if you have a valid 
Fortran 77 code, it will in all likelihood be a validate Fortran
2008 program.  Fortran 95 deleted 10 features from the language;
however, every compiler that I've used still supports those features.

In regards to HPC and Fortran, Fortran 2008 introduced this wonderful
feature called co-arrays.  One can read about gfortran's progress with
its implementation of co-arrays at http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Coarray

-- 
Steve