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Comment by pklausler | Hacker News Reader

F’23 doesn’t have much in it that’s new over F’18, which itself was also a pretty minor update to F’08.

One thing to watch out for: in a departure from former commitments to compatibility, F’23 changes some semantics of working conforming code, specifically allocatable characters being used for internal writes, iomsg=, &c.

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It must be hard to update a language that was already perfect in 1990.

Fortran first appeared in 1957... It's probably older than most people here on HN.

"The first significantly widespread high-level language was Fortran."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_programming_langu...

As the other comment pointed out, F90 is surprisingly good considering it is also probably older than most people on this site, haha.

It's just 34 more yeats until F'57 becomes ambigous ..

I think you’ve made a typo,

> yeats

It is yeets, two e’s no a.

Lots of information here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/

F'90 lacked allocatable derived type components, but was otherwise very well thought out, and its major contributions (modules, free form, internal procedures, generic interfaces, ELEMENTAL, array syntax, POINTER/TARGET...) have held up well. Kind of a mixed bag since then, frankly (FORALL, LEN type parameters, FINAL, ENUM, DO CONCURRENT...)

The "new" Fortran for me was f77.

> allocatable characters being used for internal writes can you explain this ?

If you allocate a character object, then write to it with an internal write statement, F’23 now requires that the variable be reallocated to the actual length of the formatted record, instead of retaining its former length and being padded out with blanks (or truncated).

The LLVM Fortran compiler (Flang) has warnings for various usages whose semantics would change if F'23 semantics were adopted by default, which I'm not sure I want to do.

I've never used fortran so I'm not sure what a character object or an internal write is, but in C would this be something like allocating a character array and sprintf-ing to it?

That's a good analogy, with the change being that sprintf is now somehow required to reallocate your buffer on every call if the length ever changes.

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