Answers to Fortran Trivia Questions Reunion - March 2003 Category: Quotes These appear in chronological order. Who was "I" in the following quote from a May 1973 article in "Datamation"? _Dan McCracken_ Like many people, I was tremendously impressed with professor Dijkstra's Turing lecture at the ACM meeting in Boston. I tend to agree with him that the rightlanguage remains to be developed. When that happy day arrives, I will endeavor to write the first textbook about it! But in the meantime .... FORTRAN it is, for the technical and engineering side of the computing world. For extra points, what was the title of this article? __Is There a Fortran in Your Future?_ The following is from a manuscript for "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" (June 1975). An excerpt was reprinted in SIGPLAN Notices (Feb. 1982). Who was the author? ___ Dijkstra ___ FORTRAN, "the infantile disorder", by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today; it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use. PL/I -"the fatal disease"-belongs more to the problem set than to the Solution set. It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence. APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums. Who wrote the following in a report for the Commission of the European Communities, September, 1976? _David Muxworthy_ The main concern of the American Standards Committee for Fortran, meeting for the first time in 1962, was to promote a high degree of interchangeability of Fortran programs for use on a variety of systems. Thus the concept of Fortran as a language for writing portable software was established in the early 1960's. .... Given the wide range of environments in which a program may have to operate, portability is more a skill than a science. Its best exponent is an intelligent informed programmer. Fortran 77 became an official standard on Apr. 3, 1978. Who wrote the following on Feb. 10, 1978? __Stuart Feldman__ "The Fortran language has just been revised, and a new standard for the language, known as Fortran 77 is about to be published. We report here a compiler and run-time system for the new extended language. This is believed to be the first complete Fortran 77 system to be implemented. This compiler is designed to be portable, to be correct and complete, and to generate code compatible with calling sequences produced by C compilers. In particular, this Fortran is quite usable on UNIX systems." The following is from a proposal passed by a vote of (29-2) at X3J3-69 (Aug. 1979). Whose proposal was it? __Kurt Hirchert__ The basic goal of this construct and of similar constructs in other "structured" languages is to provide a "structured" alternative for the kind of n-way branches performed by statements such as the current Fortran computed GO TO. It has been noted that the current block-IF construct (using the ELSEIF statement) has the same flow of control patterns as the proposed CASE construct when appropriate test expressions are used. Thus a very good optimizing compiler might produce the same code for such a block-IF as it would for a CASE construct. On the other hand, the block-IF is notationally cumbersome for these purposes. Also, the reader of such code, whether it be a human reader or a compiler, must examine each test expression in order [to] verify the n-way nature of the test, a quality inherent in the CASE construct. Who wrote in a paper presented in Vienna, June 1982? _John Reid__ "The first reaction of most Fortran programmers on seeing examples coded in the array features of Fortran 8x is of incomprehension or horror and rarely of delight. This is a shame because there is no question that it is marvelous to be able to write X = 0 for example, to initialize an array X to zero. Everyone likes to be able to do such things, whether working on a micro- or super-computer. Difficulties arise over expressing more complicated tasks in array form." The following quotation is from an editorial in "Computers & Standards", Vol. 3, No. 1, 1984. Who was the editor? __John Berg__ "The importance of formal standards occurs when users participate in the committees, not just the vendors ..... The value of the formal process is to have the users determine which standards and when they will be changed. ... True, the users vote for standards with their purchases. And true, the formal process takes too much time. But the best solution calls for more user participation in formal standard committees, users who insist on quick standards and who readily move from one standard to the next in order to gain the greatest economic advantage over time." Who wrote the following memo? MEMO TO: FORTRAN User Community FROM: __Jeanne C. Adams__ DATE: May 29, 1984 .... The voluntary standards process in the United States requires a maximum amount of input from the user community. Commentary is very important in the final draft revision of a standard. ...The draft standard for FORTRAN 8x is in the final stages of development. A status report, called "FORTRAN Information Bulletin Number 1" (FIB), summarizes the new features and the features that are candidates for deletion from FORTRAN in 199x. Publication of the FIB is expected in a special issue of FORTEC and SIGNUM this summer. Who said, in response to an interview question, in the January 1985 issue of "Computer Language"? _Loren Meissner_ "Everybody has taken FORTRAN 77 and extended it with all sorts of wonderful new features. Along comes X3J3 with all these beautiful, bold ideas and that's "Futuretran." That's where we're trying to get. The question is, how can we get there from here? The answer that X3J3 came up with is to take everything you want and concatenate it to everything you've got and you build this huge compiler. You live with this huge compiler until the 1990s. It has to handle all of FORTRAN 77 plus everything you want in that compiler of the year 2001. Then in the year 2000 these deprecated features fly away, leaving you with Futuretran. You get there, then, at the expense of having an unnecessarily large language for at least one revision cycle." The following quotation is from an article in Fortran Forum, June 1985, titled "Is Fortran Getting Too Big?" Who wrote it? __Jerrold Wagener__ No one denies that the evolution of Fortran has been driven by the needs of the scientific community, especially in the area of numerical computation. The specific needs of this general community, however, are extremely and increasingly diverse. Nevertheless, these needs must be addressed by Fortran. Will Fortran become an ever larger language as functionality is added in the form of intrinsic features? Or will Fortran remain manageable in size while steadily decreasing in effectiveness relative to the needs of the scientific community? Or is there a third alternative? The only way to provide increased functionality without increasing the size of language is through the mechanism of procedures and modules. These mechanisms may be used in ways that do not compromise portability and optimization potential. Many candidates for incorporation into the language as intrinsic features can be expressed straightforwardly in terms of other Fortran features. Whose proposal to X3J3 meeting 99 in April of 1986 contained these words? __Richard Hendrickson__ "There has been considerable discussion over the last few meetings about the size and complexity of Fortran 8x. It is my personal view that the language is too large and too complex. These are subjective views and hard to quantify. I propose removing several features from the language and simplifying several others. This does NOT mean that I think these features are bad, useless, inconsistent, incomplete or unnecessary. It merely means I think Fortran fills a restricted ecological niche. I believe that Fortran stands for high-performance, easy-to-use computation and that the features on my hit list have gone too far, too fast. I do believe that most of the features are of merit and I propose that they be placed in an "official" appendix to the standard." Whose preference is stated in a paper titled, "Halifax Resolution 14 (Significant Blanks) discussed at meeting 102 in Nov. 1986? __Jeanne Martin__ "At the 72nd X3J3 meeting, significant blanks were adopted by a roll call vote of (19-6). They remained in Fortran 8X until the 100th meeting (6 years later) when they were removed as part of the compromise plan that was adopted at that meeting. As it now stands, the document will go out for public review with no mention of the consideration that was given to a possible change in the status of blanks. On an issue that received as much publicity as this one did, it seems negligent on the part of the committee to completely ignore its own past history. We have not done that for other features, such as Bit and Condition Handling, that have had much shorter tenures within the language. They will at least appear in the Appendix. Unfortunately, the use of blanks as significant characters is not something that fits the concept of language extension features. Blanks must be either recognized or not. My preference would be to reinstate meaningful blanks as they existed in S8 prior to the 100th meeting ...... Who was "I" in the following from a paper dated 13 September 1988 __Larry Rolison__ "I have also repeatedly said that Fortran should not repeat the mistake of Pascal by implementing only strongly typed pointers. Remember just a few years ago when Pascal was the darling of the industry because it was so very safe? Remember how it enforced "correct" and "good" programming by only providing strongly typed pointers so a programmer could not shoot her/himself in the foot even if s/he wanted to? Remember what a great systems programming language it was supposed to be? And then C crawled out from under its rock and into the "darling of the industry" spotlight because realprogrammers found out very quickly that real systems programming could not be done with Pascal, and there was little C offering them all the freedom (and more) that they had been hungering for." Whose NO vote was submitted with these comments on a ballot that closed on Feb. 1, 1989? __Bill Leonard__ S8.110 is a vast improvement over S8.104, but it still falls far short of meeting the objections from the Public Review. Especially missing are real responses to the objections to the size and complexity. The committee has attempted to snip off the corners here and there, while adding major features such as multi-byte characters and a POINTER data type, and pass off the result as a real reduction in size and complexity. This is utter nonsense. Features such as MODULE/USE and overloading are a major source of size and complexity; the existence of two source forms (now more than ever incompatible with the introduction of significant blanks) and new syntax for declarations represent unnecessary duplication that further adds to the size of the language. The fact remains that users simply cannot absorb a change to the language of this magnitude in one step, no matter how long has elapsed between standards. S8.110 still represents a replacement of the language, rather than a revision, and as such it will be years before quality implementations exist. That hardly serves the best interests of the user, regardless of how much he/she might want the features contained in S8.110. The following quote is from an article published in "DATALINK" on 4 September 1989. Who wrote the article? __Brian Meek__ "For the last few years, Fortran 77 has been widely (though not universally) regarded as the Living Dead of the world of major programming languages, kept in existence only by the wrangling over the nature of its successor, Fortran 8X. Despite the huge bulk of its user applications, it seemed that gradually it was becoming more zombie-like as various segments began to break off, and fall victim to examples of the Deadly Living, like Ada or C. However, all that seemed to have changed when the international (ISO) Fortran committee, SC22/WG5, put its foot down a year ago in Paris and said, in effect, "enough is enough" (see Datalink 17/10/88), and the US committee X3J3 thereafter, if with reluctance in some cases, fell into line in the interests of international agreement (see Datalink 9/1/89)." In 1990, who wrote the following in response to a letter in CACM? _Walt Brainerd_ "When work began in 1978 to revise Fortran 77, many of us felt that there should be some means of removing old features that have more efficient or more reliable replacements. We decided to create a category of these "obsolete features", which would be listed in the Fortran 90 standard, possibly be removed from the Fortran 2000 standard, and possibly fade from compilers and general use around 2020. This schedule was considered too radical by many people, both on and off of X3J3, so all the features that really can make a difference in performance, such as EQUIVALENCE, were removed from the list, leaving things like the assigned GO TO and the PAUSE statements. .... Surely 30 years is sufficient time to eliminate these features from working programs, when it is remembered that Fortran itself is only a little more than 30 years old, but those who still feel strongly about this will have to try to do something about it during the next revision cycle, if there is one." Who was the principal author of a proposal presented at the 116th X3J3 meeting in August 1990 in Oxford that contained the following recommendation: _Maureen Hoffert_ "Add a specification statement that lists names of module or internal procedures that are referenced in the program unit ahead of their definitions." Who proposed the following principals for the future evolution of Fortran at the Lund WG5 meeting in June of 1991? _Lawrie Schonfelder_ 1. A major revision of Fortran 90 should NOT be started now. 2. We should work for the next few years through "corrigendum" and "addendum" processes 3.We should be come more active in looking at work outside the narrow confines of the Fortran standard world to identify those areas which are relevant to Fortran, its development and its users. 4. We should seek to actively review and participate in the work on bindings into Fortran 90. 5. We should strongly constrain the production of addenda to employing the extensibility properties of Fortran 90. (The Varying-string module is a good paradigm). 6. A revision of ISO/IEC 1539:1991 should be contemplated in about 1996. this revision should be accomplished by the incorporation of any corrigenda and relevant addenda in the revised standard. An open ended wholesale revision should NOT be undertaken. Obsolescent features could be removed at this stage and further such features identified. Fill in the blanks in this quotation from an article in "BYTE" magazine, September 1991. "_Jeanne Martin_, of the ANSI FORTRAN committee X3J3, explains why FORTRAN has not been subsumed by another, more general language: PL/I is no longer viable as a portable language, since its standards committee has been disbanded; Ada has never been accepted by the scientific community; and although currently popular, C is, according to _ Martin _,"sort of a hacker's language," with code sometimes readable only by its author. FORTRAN code looks more like the application being programmed and has superior array facilities. So much is invested in already- written and optimized FORTRAN code that it will necessarily continue to be used. It is the blue-collar language of the scientific, number-crunching community." Who proposed at X3J3 meeting 129, May 1994, the following recommendation to be forwarded to WG5? _Janice Shepard__ "X3J3 recommends that a corrigendum 3 be undertaken if there exist defects with the status of "X3J3 approved; ready for WG5" that contain significant edits to the Fortran 90 standard (ISO/IEC 1539:1991). Significant edits are ones that can affect the understanding, implementation or use of the Fortran language. An example of such a defect is item 125. Item 125 deals with dummy arguments that have the TARGET attribute. Existing implementations have widely diverse semantics for dummy arguments with the TARGET attribute due to the history of item 125." Who suggested the following definition in a paper at the 133rd meeting, April 1995 in Kihei, Hawaii? __Linda O'Gara__ "Interoperability is the ability to request arbitrary services implemented in other languages through a procedure call from within Fortran programs." This does not address the problem of taking an application written in a combination of C and Fortran and moving it from one platform to another without change. You can't do that with C; you can't do that with Fortran (just talk to someone who does it for a living); and you certainly shouldn't expect the problem to get solved when you complicate the problem with more than one language. The following is an excerpt from an email message sent to SC22, national organizations, and fortran newsgroups. Who was it from? From: _Miles Ellis_ Subject: The final content of Fortran 2000 is determined Date: 1 Mar. 1997 ..... In accordance with its agreed policy, WG5 has delegated the responsibility of preparing the draft CD for Fortran 2000 to its Principal Development Body, the US Fortran Technical Committee - X3J3. ... It is the intention of WG5 that the revised standard shall be published no later than November 2002. (Whether it will be known as Fortran 2000, Fortran 2002, or something else has yet to be agreed.) Who wrote a paper for meeting 155, Dec. 2000, that contained the following? __Stan Whitlock__ "Some of us implement Fortran 95 on 64-bit machines. ...., that means: � there is a 64-bit integer, KIND = 8 � default integer is 32-bit, KIND = 4 � arrays can have dimensions longer than 2**31 � CHARACTER strings can have lengths longer than 2**31 � addresses are 64-bit so Cray-style POINTERs are 64-bits It doesn't take a 64-bit machine to run into limitations on Fortran 95's default integer but a 64-bit machine makes them really obvious. Category: Numbers What is the largest recorded attendance at an X3J3 meeting? a. 42 b. 50 c. 58 - mtg. 70, Oct. 79 What is the largest recorded attendance at a WG5 meeting? a. 37 b. 41 c. 45 Extra: When and where was this historic WG5 meeting? Paris, Sept. 1988 What is the greatest number of pages (Minutes and papers) generated at a single X3J3 meeting? a. 924 Mtg. 109 8/88 Jackson Hole, WY 46 attendees b. 1055 Mtg. 114 1/90 Richardson, TX 44 attendees c. 1068 Mtg. 115 4/90 Incline Village, NV 56 attendees How many languages was Fortran 90 translated into? a. 2 Japanese and Russian b. 3 c. 4 How many languages was Fortran 77 translated into? a. 2 French and Japanese b. 3 c. 4 How many months did it take Malcolm and others at the NAG office in Oxford to develop the first Fortran 90 implementation (prior to the first announcement of availability)? a. 12 mos. b. 18 mos. c. 24 mos. How many times has WG5 met twice in one year? a. 2 b. 4 90, 91, 95, 97 c. 6 How many items were is WG5/SD5 Repository of Requirements (WG5/N871) when it was first created prior to the Berchtesgaden meeting in July of 1993? a. 4 b. 6 c. 8 How many of those have found their way into a draft standard in some form or other? a. all b. all but 1 c. half If F66 is the last numbered page of X3.9-1966 (Fortran 66) and F2000 is the last numbered page of the CD ballot document for F2000, what is F2000 / F66? a. 10.25 b. 15.19 c. 20.33 If F90 is the last numbered page of ISO/IEC 1539:1991, and F95 is the last numbered page of ISO/IEC 1539-1:1997, what is F95 - F90? a. -13 b. 26 c. 52 Category: Dates These are also in chronological order. At which X3J3 meeting was the addition of IF-THEN-ELSE approved? a. mtg. 45 - Jan. 75 - Dallas, TX b. mtg. 50 - Oct. 75 - Sunnyvale, CA c. mtg. 54 - July 76 - Idaho Falls, ID When was the Hague Agreement (that initiated international programming language collaboration) formulated? a. Nov. 76 b. Nov. 77 c. Nov. 78 At its peak X3J3 membership was 48, When was this? a. Aug 88 - Nov 88 b. July 88 - Jan 90 c. Aug 90 - Dec 90 The publication date of Fortran 90 was 1 July 1991. When did NAG announce the availability of the NAGWare f90 compiler? a. June 1991 b. Aug. 1991 c. Oct. 1991 The publication date of Fortran 90 was 1 July 1991. When did Jeanne Adams resign as Chair of X3J3? a. July 1991 b. Nov. 1991 c. Jan. 1992 The publication date of Fortran 95 was 15 Dec. 1997. When did Jerry Wagener's term as Chair of X3J3 end? a. Aug. 1997 b. Nov. 1997 c. Jan. 1998 Category: Language Features What new feature in Fortran 90 (thought at the time to be simple) was thefirst for which proposals (for semantics) were written and straw votes taken? Internal procedures What was the first new feature adopted for Fortran 90 (semantics and syntax)? Did the syntax survive? Loop construct No What feature has been in and out of the language the most times? Bit data type What feature has had the most different names? Modules What was the first feature enhancement adopted for Fortran 95? (It was one of the first entered in the Repository.) Namelist comments Category: People Only two names appear in both the 66 and 77 standards as members of the developing committees for those standards. Can you name at least one? M. Greenfield and C. B. Bailey Which US X3J3 member was awarded honorary membership in the British Computer Society? Frank Engel Who caused the name USASI of the US standards organization to be changed to ANSI and why? Ralph Nader, because he complained the name implied it was a government department. Why was X3 changed to INCITS? Any name containing X has unwanted implications to internet users. What IBM consultant influenced the array features in Fortran 90? George Paul What British Texan influenced the array features in Fortran 90? Alan Wilson Who had a difficult time because of a misunderstanding about his name at the Turin SC5/Fortran Experts meeting? Richard Signor Who was the long-time head of the I/O Subgroup whose luggage went to Singapore when he went to Amsterdam (following an X3J3 meeting in Florida)? Jim Matheny What loyal member had the most different "affiliations"? Murray Freeman - 7 [Philco-Ford, Aero.-Ford, HLSUA (Honeywell Large Scale Users Asso.) Siemens, GE, Bell Labs, Bell Communications Research, and finally alternate to Kurt Hirchert for ~13 yrs.) What X3J3 member was most famous for the jokes he told? Alex Marusak Which X3J3 member sponsored Implementation Workshops for Fortran 90? Tom Lahey Who chaired the Paris WG5 meeting? Bert Buckley Who has attended the most WG5 meetings? David Muxworthy Can you name the long-time representative from each of these countries? (none here today) Austria Gerhard Schmidt Germany Karl-Heinz Rotthaeuser Netherlands Kees Ampt Italy Aurelio Pollicini Russia Alla Gorelic Who had the best singing voice at the impromptu vocal session following the social event in Berchtesgaden? Steve Morgan Who made the video? Hopper and Ellis Since May 1997, who has contributed the most papers to the J3 distribution? Van Snyder What J3 principal member's legal status has been maintained more by the presence of his alternates than his own? Brian Smith List the J3 Chairs in order. Heising, Engel, Adams, Wagener, Warnock, Nagle List the [Fortran Experts, WG9] WG5 Convenors in order. Adams, Martin, Ellis, Reid List the IBM representatives on J3 in order. Ward Klein, Gloria Bauer. Charles Ferguson, R. Weaver, Janice Shepherd, H. Zongaro, Rob James List the DEC representatives on J3 in order. Frank Infante, Ron Brender, Rich Grove, Joel Clinkenbeard, Kevin Harris, Stan Whitlock