I concur that it is unclear why the
standard is as it is, but I don't think to break the standard with default
options (-std=gnu is the default) is a good idea.
Well, yeah. I guess one can argue about this.
On one hand, a good Fortran compiler should clearly obey the Fortran
standard. And with the -std=... switch, we even have a nice way of
supporting different versions of the standard.
On the other hand, I'd rather implement something that "makes sense"
than something that blindly obeys some (screwed-up) standard. So, the
first thing should be of course to find out whether this was in fact
"screwed up" in the standard, or if it was done on purpose (and if
yes, for what reason).
My idea behind implementing it as an extension was to support both
options, and let the user choose which one he wants. However, I agree
that using the non-standard version by default may be dangerous. Since
we probably don't want to make -std=f2008 the default (for reasons of
backward compatibility), one alternative might be to add a separate
switch ("-finalize-main" or whatever).