Re: Array mappings

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Mike, you sure have posted lots of messages on the Fortran array issue. My
own feeling is that this is a nice feature, but not particularly critical.
Having to reorder array subscripts is not exactly the biggest barrier to
the use of Ada arrays in Fortran programs! You ask if vendors explicitly
ran around trying to "dig up" this market. I doubt it. Instead they probably
assumed that this was not a major issue, because no customers bought it up.
As for it being a possibly lucrative market, I VERY much doubt it. THere
were much more important targets of opportunity than this one.

It is true that it would not have been very hard to implement, which just
goes to show the estimate of value placed on this feature by vendors, and
personally I think that this was a reasonable estimate.

Ada 9X requires this support. Whether that requirement is justified
remains to be seen. That will really show whether Mike is right. If we
see a huge army of Fortran programmers suddenly saying "great, now that
I can write my subscripts the "right" way round in Ada 95, I will switch
to using Ada", then we will know that Mike was rigt, and that Ada vendors
missed an important opportunity.

Note: Many Fortran programmers are moving to C, C doesn't have any help
for Fortran array ordering, and I never heard of this being an adoption
barrier.