Fortran is still a thing

Re:Fortran is still a thing by Koshkin on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @02:57PM (#18546089)

C11 still looks like (and still is) C, despite the new features. In contrast, to say that the new Fortran is the same 'thing' as the old Fortran is disingenuous. For example, the old Fortran did not support recursion (which fact I consider a feature rather than a "bug").

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Re:Fortran is still a thing by slededit on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @11:37PM (#18549318)

ANSI C looks pretty different to K&R C, especially in the function declaration syntax. The only difference is Fortran had its facelift just a little later.

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Re:Fortran is still a thing by coldtea on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @04:14PM (#18546831)

>For example, the old Fortran did not support recursion (which fact I consider a feature rather than a "bug").

So? C# 1.0 didn't support 90% of the cool features of C# whatever it is now, not even LINQ, the bread and butter of C# programmers.

Java up to 1.4 didn't have generics, closures, streams, modules, and tons of other stuff besides. Soon it will be getting many more.

Is it a different language for that?

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Re:Fortran is still a thing by Koshkin on Tuesday November 27, 2018 @04:33PM (#18547034)

On the other hand, C was given a different name when classes were added to it.

Thing is, adding and/or removing features may have an impact on the implementation, can potentially introduce subtle changes to the semantics of the existing constructs and therefore their behavior at run time, have general performance implications (e.g. due to a change in what optimizations are possible), etc. Is it "the same language"? Not quite. It is a "super-language," at best. If it's 100% backwards compatible, that is (which is not guaranteed).

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