16 Oct
2011
16 Oct
'11
5:07 p.m.
On 16 Oct 2011 at 16:36, Eric Smith wrote:
Could C have been defined with the smallest
addressable unit as the
bit? Of course. But it wasn't, and unless you convince the standards
committee to change it, we're stuck with it.
And shame of shames, F90 also rejected the idea, even though the user
community seemed to think that it was a useful idea. In particular,
both DEC and IBM threatened to withdraw from X3J3 if real vectors
were implemented, rather than simply blessing IBM's array arithmetic
as "vector extensions".
It was a nasty time. F90 was supposed to have been F88, but the
quibbling delayed adoption.
Personally, I like F77 a lot more than F90 and its ilk. FORTRAN
started out as a simple language and just got worse by leaps and
bounds.
Committees can do that, I guess.
--Chuck