ABSTRACT
Fortran has been a follower, not a leader, as far as adopting data structure and management capabilities. John Reid became convinced of the need for standards in the language in the ‘70s when his IBM Fortran codes could not run on other computers without changes. The vendor representatives on the committee were protective of their investment and preferred to keep old-style Fortran and make little to no changes. Of course, the existence of large and complex old Fortran codes makes it next to impossible to remove features. The new generation of committee members and users have to decide what is important for the Fortran language. Jon Steidel, from Intel, is another old-timer in Fortran-world. The coarrays story is one facet of Fortran's struggles with expressing parallelism. For Fortran the language itself has to contain everything that is needed for numerical scientific computing.
