(SC22WG14.323) Re: reaction to Variable Length Array Proposal

[Matt Austern]

> No, but it seems to be the view of some participants that the entire
> world *should* convert (eventually) from FORTRAN completely over to C.
> I question the real need (and possibility) for such a massive and uni-
> versal shift, but that is besides the point.  We agree that *some*
> folks may indeed have good reason to convert *some* code from FORTRAN
> to C, but we now are hearing arguments that we need to bend over back-
> ward to ease such transitions, and that in fact, what we need to do
> is to design a new language which is a superset of both FORTRAN and C
> (with all of the features of both).

Agreed.  Our goal should be to make C a useful language for numerical
computation, not to make C into a copy of FORTRAN---the two goals are
not the same!

If, instead of C extended for numerical computations, we come out with
a complicated half-C, half-FORTRAN hybrid, then we'll just have wasted
our time: nobody will write compilers for that language, and nobody
will use it.