Fast forwarding Fortran, Part 1: Clean Fortran

摘要

Fortran 90 represents an important advance in language design for scientific and engineering computing, and will we believe be widely used, However, a number of language facilities widely regarded as useful, still are absent from Fortran 90. Others, widely regarded as adding nothing but irregularity to the language, remain part of it, and their continued existence makes the addition of new features more difficult. And yet, the weight of existing code makes deletion of these features from the ISO standard a difficult and slow process. In this paper we discuss a version of Fortran 90 which we refer to as Clean Fortran. It contains a number of restrictions to the current language. The restrictions are made to remove irregularities. The resulting language is intended to form a base from which much-needed language extensions can be more readily incorporated. We discuss also a way in which Clean Fortran, or some agreed variant of it, can be readily incorporated into the current language evolution cycle by re-introducing a Subset Fortran language.