Re: Compiler implementation language preference ?

Michael Justice <nullcompiler@gmail.com> wrote:


> <snip>> [Mostly people use what they're used to, or in languages that are easy
> to bootstrap on the machines they want to use. IBM's Fortran H
> compiler was famously written in itself, but I wouldn't write a new
> compiler in Fortran because it doesn't have great data structuring or
> dynamic storage management. (Yes, I know that Fortran 2008 is a lot
> different from Fortran 66.) -John]


With pointers and allocatable arrays I don't see Fortran lacking in
allocatable storage management. With derived types and inheritance I
don't see it lacking in data structuring compared to, say, ISO C.


Allocatable length character strings has largely eliminated the
weaknesses of its character type, though in practice it is probably
best to deal with Unicode encodings by mapping them to a standatard
encoding using eight bit integers. The ISO_FORTRAN_ENV module allows
it to portably deal with multiple sized integers, so that such things
as UTF-8 files can be handled. Fortran compatible pre-processors
exist, though they are not as well known as the C pre-processor. What
it does lack, compared to ISO C, are type casts, and unsigned
integers. What it lacks compared to C++ is templates. More importantly
it has a user community focussed on numerics, that is relatively
unfamiliar with the types of algorithms used in compilers, and is
relativly uninterested in such applications.

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