(j3.2006) (SC22WG5.5869) [ukfortran] N2126

[Van Snyder]

On Mon, 2017-06-05 at 12:45 +0000, Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) wrote:
> > widely available, and widely used,
> > in other high level languages - is that not a use case?
> 
> Not an argument that generally gets much sympathy in this committee.
> Just work it backwards - why were those features widely used in the
> other languages?

People aren't rushing from Fortran to C++ to get the C preprocessor.
They want templates (which were called generic packages in Ada in 1983).
We briefly considered parameterized modules, then macros, then
essentially no support for generic programming.

Both Ada and C++ supported generic programming from their origination,
so it's not a new untried mystery.

If we had had parameterized modules, it is unlikely we would have done
parameterized derived types -- at least not with kind parameters.  And
we wouldn't have ended up with the disconnect between parameterized
types and type-bound procedures that Richard Maine warned about twenty
years ago.