Re: DEC Extension Support for gcc-4.8.3

[W Spector <w6ws@earthlink.net>]

Jim Secan <james dot secan at gmail dot com> wrote:

> ... Others, structures being the main one, also raise old memories (and not fond ones) of the Fortran committee rejecting this de-facto standard in the first place.

DEC added VAX structures in an intentionally incompatible way from the 
direction the Fortran committee was headed.  Blame should be on DEC - 
not the Fortran committee.

That said, I've dealt with some Fortran code in the past where having a 
'union' capability in derived types would have been quite helpful.  I 
was able to work around it with some clever use (read: giant hack) of 
F90 pointers, and it worked.  However if I were to revisit that project 
today, I would try really hard to use type extension to eliminate some 
of the cleverness/hackishness.

So I am not really against gfortran including VAX structures/unions - 
provided they are only enabled via special compiler flags.  I know what 
a PITA it can be in certain cases to work around not having them - 
especially when porting old code.

A number of the other VAX extensions have direct substitutions in modern 
Fortran.  Simple editing tools and shell scripts can be used to do the 
substitutions for an entire code base in a few seconds.  So I am less 
sympathetic to them.

Walter