Subject: [[email-masked]: Re: March HPFF minutes]

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 16:18:59 -0600

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Date: Tue, 24 Mar 92 16:23:53 EST
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re:  March HPFF minutes
Cc: [email-masked]

Chuck,

I don't have the time to attend the HPFF meetings, so I really appreciate
the minutes you've distributed.

On the question of polling users about Fortran 90.  I make at least a 
couple of presentations to different customers every week.  I always ask
them about this, because I accept that KSR will do Fortran 90 some day,
but I need more information in order to pick the day.  I suspect that
I have conducted a more conscientious poll of people who really do use
parallel machines and intend to buy more parallel machines than
anybody else.  These are not views based on my talking to implementors
or language lawyers or reading magazines.

I get very consistent answers to my questions.  Just about everybody
really likes the array syntax.  Some people really want the features that
require passing dope vectors, some don't need it.  Probably a 50-50 split.
Just about everybody agrees that they can easily live without the rest
of the language.  They don't require modules, pointers, structured types,
etc.  They all require allocateable arrays.  The talk about pointers
never has anything to do with Fortran 90 pointers.  It has to do with
Cray pointers.  Most people are willing to live without Cray pointers
if they have other mechanisms for allocating storage.

I haven't done any polling on storage association.  Since my machine
provides a shared memory model, it's not an issue for me.  This may
also bias my view, but I'm rather horrified by everybody's willingness
to drop storage association.  This is an extremely common programming
practice.  It's the way that Fortran programmers who are good
conscientious citizens pass columns of arrays.  If you look at any of
the big software packages (e.g., NASTRAN at 850,000 lines) they all
take advantage of storage association.  Compilers that don't continue
to provide support for this feature will leave behind a very large
fraction of the existing code base.  I believe that the major value
Fortran brings to the marketplace is the existing code base.

Thanks again for the great minutes.

	      Bruce

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