(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.5066) [ukfortran] J3 work plan

[Malcolm Cohen]

>Concerning UK-10.2e, is the intent also to obsolesce using the specific
>intrinsic names as actual arguments and procedure pointer targets?  That
>would seem to make a lot of programs stop working,

Making these obsolescent makes zero standard-conforming programs become 
non-conforming, so unless zero is "a lot", this would seem to be mistaken.

>Concerning UK-10.1a (delete arithmetic IF), my colleagues who have
>millions of lines of legacy code to maintain are concerned about the
>amount of work this might impose on them.

One might opine that eliminating arithmetic IF should have been thought about 
for approximately 30 years, or more charitably 20+ years ago when it became 
obvious that IEEE arithmetic was a serious force in the land.

If someone wishes to assert that their codes don't need to handle NaNs, the 
difficulty of the work ranges from the trivial to the utterly trivial.  Not to 
mention automatable in fact decades ago Toolpack had a tool which eliminated 
arithmetic IF except when all 3 labels were different (which does occur, but is 
a small minority).

>They like to use "conform to
>the standard" switches but fear their codes won't compile if they turn
>on the switch, even if all vendors continue to offer arithmetic IF as a
>"convenient extension."

This is assuming the compiler vendor is going to be unfriendly, contrary to 
their current actions with already-deleted features.  But even in that unlikely 
scenario, just don't use that switch on that compiler (and complain).  Or better 
yet, fix the programs so they actually work with IEEE arithmetic...

>Could we instead

No.

>frowned upon in their style guides

One might have thought that Arithmetic IF ought to have been frowned on in their 
style guides for the last 35 years too, for fairly obvious reasons.

Cheers,
-- 
................................Malcolm Cohen, Nihon NAG, Tokyo.