(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.5354) [ukfortran] From a colleague

[Malcolm Cohen]

On Tue, 2014-10-28 at 13:19 +0900, Malcolm Cohen wrote:
> So at best hearsay, at worst completely made up.  I suspect a chain of
> chinese whispers and misunderstandings.
>
> Someone claiming that someone says that someone says that someone
> won't support something at some time in the unspecified future is no
> evidence at all.

Van retorts:
>Would you like to have my colleague's e-mail address, so you can call
>him a liar

I did not do that.

> directly, or should I forward your slanders to him, with
>attribution of course?

No-one is being slandered (well, possibly the compiler vendor in question). 
Given the extreme unlikelihood of any existing Fortran compiler stopping support 
for arithmetic IF in the foreseeable future, it seems almost certain someone had 
a serious misunderstanding or someone (perhaps with the best of intentions) made 
something up.  Doesn't have to be your colleague.  Doesn't have to be a lie 
either, unless you're going around calling everyone working in advertising 
marketting etc. liars - which does not seem a profitable course of action.

Rather than rushing to the comittee with breathless despair over the forthcoming 
Arithmetic-If-alypse, clarifying who said what in the first place would seem to 
be an extremely good idea.

I remain of the opinion, as I have written in each message, that it is highly 
likely that someone had a misunderstanding.  That's ok, it happens every day. 
But before we leap to the conclusion based on *at best hearsay evidence* that 
some compiler writer is (a) completely bonkers, and (b) going to make a decision 
based on what we do in F2015, it behooves the bearer of unlikely tidings to 
confirm the veracity of the tale.

(As it happens, only last week we had a bug report on arithmetic IF, and I 
pointed out to my colleagues that they should tell the user that not only do we 
disrecommend its use, but also it was going to be deleted from F2015 because it 
was broken re IEEE arithmetic.  So this matches both the timing of the panic and 
the mention of IEEE arithmetic, which is suspicious.  So just in case it is 
allegedly us who said this, note that there is absolutely no question of us 
dropping support for arithmetic IF in the foreseeable future, so in that case 
either your colleague misunderstood the message, or one of my colleagues 
misunderstood the message, or made a typo, or just wrote something without 
thinking.)

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