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0 pointsaw16211075mo ago0 comments

Because given the work needed to actually get a feature into the standard I'd assume there's at least some demand motivating the addition.

I'd also be a bit hesitant about claiming that nobody is using said features. It's quite possible that the "new" feature is actually "just" a standardization of something that exists in practice. WG14 is hardly a stranger to that kind of thing, from what I understand; it wouldn't surprise me if something similar occurs for the Fortran/COBOL working groups as well.

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pklausler5mo ago

That's a reasonable assumption, but it turns out to rarely be the case with WG5/SC22/J3. There are exceptions (like SIND, SINPI, &c.), but most new features in Fortran standards are committee inventions without prototypes, reference implementations, or official conformance test suites. This leads to incompatible implementations, and then lack of use in codes that need to be portable. It's a mess, really. I have a test suite of examples of this kind of thing that accumulated during the implementation of flang-new, in which it was a difficult task to figure out what portable Fortran really means in a way that's meaningful to users.

aw1621107OP5mo ago

I'll defer to your expertise here. If C++'s experience with similar situations is any indication it really does not seem like a fun spot to be in.

Does make me curious how the dynamics of the Fortran/COBOL committees differs from that of the C/C++ committees.

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