F95 supports F77 too, right? (was Re: GCC 4.0 vs. 3.5

[Robert Dewar]

Nathanael Nerode wrote:

> I was under the impression that the new Fortran compiler was fully functional
> as a Fortran 77 compiler, or at least that it was supposed to be before
> g77 was removed from the tree.  Was I mistaken?

Well certainly we hope that the new Fortran compiler will in
practice substitute effectively for g77, and for many users
of Fortran, success will be if this transfer is 100%
transparent, which you might argue says we don't need a
version number change. The point is that this is a major
change in technology, the switch to 4.0 (particularly the
.0 part of this) alerts people to the fact that there is
a major change in technology, and that the switch may not
be 100% smooth.

Indeed many organizations I know ban any use of software
whose version number ends .0 and this has become an unofficial
signal that software may be a more unreliable state, so we
need to undersatnd that signal in this change too. I personally
think the signal is appropriate in this case.