The Shape of Code

An updated version of ISO/IEC 1539-1 Information technology — Programming languages — Fortran — Part 1: Base language has just been published. So what has JTC1/SC22/WG5 been up to?

This latest document is bug a release of the 2010 standard, known as Fortran 2008 (because the ANSI Standard from which the ISO Standard was derived, sed -e "s/ANSI/ISO/g" -e "s/National/International/g", was published in 2008) and incorporates all the published corrigenda. I must have been busy in 2008, because I did not look to see what had changed.

Actually the document I am looking at is the British Standard. BSI don’t bother with sed, they just glue a BSI Standards Publication page on the front and add BS to the name, i.e., BS ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010.

The interesting stuff is in Annex B, “Deleted and obsolescent features” (the new features are Fortranized versions of languages features you have probable seen elsewhere).

Programming language committees are known for issuing dire warnings that various language features are obsolescent and likely to be removed in a future revision of the standard, but actually removing anything is another matter.

Well, the Fortran committee have gone and deleted six features! Why wasn’t this on the news? Did the committee foresee the 2008 financial crisis and decide to sneak out the deletions while people were looking elsewhere?

What constructs cannot now appear in conforming Fortran programs?

1. “Real and double precision DO variables. .. A similar result can be achieved by using a DO construct with no loop control and the appropriate exit test.”

   What other languages call a for-loop, Fortran calls a DO loop. So loop control variables can no longer have a floating-point type.

2. “Branching to an END IF statement from outside its block.”

   An if-statement is terminated by the token sequence END IF, which may have an optional label. It is no longer possible to GOTO that label from outside the block of the if-statement. You are going to have to label the statement after it.

3. “PAUSE statement.”

   This statement dates from the days when a computer (singular, not plural) had its own air-conditioned room and a team of operators to tend its every need. A PAUSE statement would cause a message to appear on the operators’ console and somebody would be dispatched to check the printer was switched on and had paper, or some such thing, and they would then resume execution of the paused program.

   I think WG5 has not seen the future here. Isn’t the PAUSE statement needed again for cloud computing? I’m sure that Amazon would be happy to quote a price for having an operator respond to a PAUSE statement.

4. “ASSIGN and assigned GO TO statements and assigned format specifiers.”

   No more assigning labels to variables and GOTOing them, as a means of leaping around 1,000 line functions. This modern programming practice stuff is a real killjoy.

5. “H edit descriptor.”

   First programmers stopped using punched cards and now the H edit descriptor have been removed from Fortran; Herman Hollerith no longer touches the life of working programmers.

   In the good old days real programmers wrote 11HHello World. Using quote delimiters for string literals is for pansies.

6. “Vertical format control. … There was no standard way to detect whether output to a unit resulted in this vertical format control, and no way to specify that it should be applied; this has been deleted. The effect can be achieved by post-processing a formatted file.”

   Don’t panic, C still supports the \v escape sequence.