[J3] 18-156

[Damian Rouson]

On February 26, 2018 at 5:00:13 PM, Van Snyder via J3 (j3 at mailman.j3-fortran.org) wrote:

On Mon, 2018-02-26 at 23:24 +0000, Bill Long via J3 wrote:

> Van knows that UNITS were killed at the London WG5 meeting. I assume
> he informed his colleagues that this was a dead issue.?

When I asked what the objections were, Dan and John produced a document
that says "nobody asked for it." Grant Petty asked for it. I asked for
it on behalf of dozens of my colleagues who develop and maintain
software for engineering and scientific applications, not device drivers
or video games or web pages. Others supported it in comp-fortran-90 and
comp.lang.fortran. Marcus Foster wrote about it recently.?
And units were on my list of 5 items written in response to Steve?s request at the beginning of meeting 215. ? Even if it were the case that a units proposal was ?killed at London WG5 meeting,? that was for Fortran 2018. I don?t think that precludes discussing the feature for Fortran 202X. ?We don?t seem to be treating other previously rejected proposals that way.

If I were to rank the features we are discussing based on my own personal use of Fortran in projects and in teaching, I would rank units at the top because I?m already having to roll my own solution in the absence of language support. ?I recognize the greater demand for generic programming and better error-handling so I agree with keeping those as the top priorities for major feature addition, but I think units at least deserves a thorough vetting for newer members of the committee who weren?t involved in the discussions of it in years past. Generic programming and improved error-handling appear to have taken top priority for Fortran 202X largely because one of Fortran?s primary competitor languages supports analogous features. ?In addition to shoring up Fortran?s deficiencies relative to other languages, I think it?s also important for Fortran to lead and provide features that no other mainstream language supports. The units proposal is one such feature set.

?Can we ever do anything about reliability, and reducing
labor costs?
I sure hope so. ?I think greater certainty around program correctness is one of Fortran?s selling points. ?(Anyone who has had to deal with memory leaks or dangling pointers in C/C++ ?will appreciate the increased reliability of Fortran's allocatable variables, for example.) ?

For the present revision we insist upon use cases. Does anybody have a
use case more extreme than having lost a $200 million project??
There cannot be very many more compelling use cases and it?s frustrating that people dismiss units without acknowledging the high cost of related mistakes. ?

I could be dissuaded form supporting units if the cost is higher than the two major feature sets that clearly have the broadest community support (generic programming and better error-handling) or if the performance cost of units is substantial, but I can only come to these conclusions if we can at least discuss the proposal without dismissing it at the very beginning of our deliberative process for 202X.

Damian
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