Public Review Comments 12, 13, 14, and 15

About Square Brackets in Fortran

To:	J3

From:	Craig Dedo

Date:	November 13, 2002

Subject:	Public Review Comments 12, 13, 14 and 15 About Square Brackets in Fortran

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#12

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From:	William Walster

Reply To:	William Walster

Sent:	Tuesday, November 12, 2002 1:56 PM

To:	Donovan, Deborah; psa@ansi.org

Cc:	bill.walster@Eng.Sun.COM

Subject:	Square Brackets

I am writing to request that the proposed use of square brackets "[.]" in the Fortran 2000 standard be reconsidered. It is difficult for me to believe that the proposed use of square brackets has higher priority than keeping them available to support interval data types.

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#13

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From:	Wayne Hayes

Sent:	Tuesday, November 12, 2002 2:12 PM

To:	Donovan, Deborah; psa@ansi.org

Subject:	Square Brackets in Fortran

Hello. I echo Bill Walster's request that square brackets be used to represent intervals in standard Fortran. It's hard to think of a more standard meaning of [a,b] than to mean "the interval between a and b".

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#14

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From:	David Bogle

Sent:	Wednesday, November 13, 2002 5:43 AM

To:	Donovan, Deborah

Cc:	Bill.Walster@Eng.Sun.COM

Subject:	Square Brackets in Standard Fortran

I would like to support this request from Bill Walster. As an active researcher and practitioner in numerical and computational techniques for solving Chemical Engineering problems, where interval techniques have a strong role to play and Fortran is still a key standard, the use of square brackets for this purpose is of key importance to us.

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#15

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From:	Ramon Moore

Sent:	Thursday, November 14, 2002 7:49 AM

To:	Donovan, Deborah

Cc:	Bill Walster

Subject: Square brackets

I am writing to request that the proposed use of square brackets "[.]" in the Fortran 2000 standard be reconsidered. Square brackets are already standard mathematical notation for closed intervals, and should be reserved for that use.

J3 Response: J3 is aware of the conflict with this syntax. Historically, some processors have used square brackets for other purposes, such as array constructors or co-arrays. J3 and WG5 have carefully considered this issue. J3 and WG5 prefer the use of square brackets for array constructors in preference to competing vendor extensions.

References

02-007r3, Fortran 2000 Committee Draft

[End of J3 / 02-329r2]