[RFC] Removal of Fortran from the base system

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On May 26, 2006, at 8:14 PM, Mike Jakubik wrote:

> Agreed, who the hell still uses Fortran?

I have great gobs of RF design and analysis code that is written in  
F77 (and 66 for that matter).  In the RF engineering field the  
Fortran versions of Spice and friends are still quite popular.  And I  
know more than a handful of physicists who will never write a line of  
C code, and nor should they, since their existing Fortran tools are  
perfectly viable.  A lot of these people rely on the system shipping  
a Fortran compiler -- they're scientists, not sysadmins.  And believe  
me ... there IS a difference!  (Now the physics guys would be tickled  
pink if the system compiler was upgraded to F95 or better ;-)

--lyndon