Response to comments regarding proposed Fortran 2008 standard

[Steve Kargl]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:11:32PM +0200, FX wrote:
> Committee responses to the F2008 draft public comments have been made  
> available at http://www.j3-fortran.org/doc/year/08/08-272.html
> 
>   1. Apparently, my reading of the standard was incorrect and  
> assignment of different character kinds isn't allowed. I believe a  
> CHARACTER conversion argument would have been really useful and will  
> be missed, but that suggestion was rejected.
>   2. My personal opinion is and continues to be that the committee is  
> on a dangerous course of standardising too early after F2003, and  
> neglecting useful features that could prove very attractive to users  
> (great languages have great standard libraries).
> 

Your point 2 is well taken.  I think J3 may have blown it
with Tobias' request to remove the transformational form
of bessel_jn().  Having used recursion for the last 20 years
to compute spherical bessel functions, I think J3 has 
severely underestimated the pitfalls with this method.
See Section 10.5 of Abramowitz and Stegun.  Coming up
with a robust algorithm is going to be fun.

-- 
Steve