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Fortran, cobol, C or other old languages that stopped changing but are still used.




All three of the languages you list are still actively updated. Coincidentally, the latest standard for all three of them is from 2023(ish):

- C23: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3096.pdf

- Cobol 2023: https://www.incits.org/news-events/news-coverage/available-n... (random press release since a PDF of the standard didn't immediately show up in a search)

- Fortran 2023: https://wg5-fortran.org/N2201-N2250/N2212.pdf

C2Y has a fair number of already-accepted features as well and it's relatively early in the standard release cycle: https://thephd.dev/c2y-hitting-the-ground-running


Can’t compile with just a PDF file, though.

Yes, compilers will take some time to implement the new standards.

C23 seems to have decent support from a few compilers, with GCC leading the pack: https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/compiler_support/23.html

gcobol supports (or at least aims to support?) COBOL 2023: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.1.0/gcobol/gcobol.html. Presumably there are other compilers working on support as well.

Intel's Fortran compiler and LFortran have partial support for Fortran 2023 (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t..., https://docs.lfortran.org/en/usage/). I'd guess that support both from these compilers and from other compilers (Flang?) would improve over time as well..


Flang does already support warnings for features that have breaking changes in F’2023.

Glad to hear it! Didn't turn up anything obvious in my brief search, but I was expecting some work towards newer standards at least.

Why would you expect that? There are few incentives to work on features that nobody is using.

Because given the work needed to actually get a feature into the standard I'd assume there's at least some demand motivating the addition.

I'd also be a bit hesitant about claiming that nobody is using said features. It's quite possible that the "new" feature is actually "just" a standardization of something that exists in practice. WG14 is hardly a stranger to that kind of thing, from what I understand; it wouldn't surprise me if something similar occurs for the Fortran/COBOL working groups as well.


That's a reasonable assumption, but it turns out to rarely be the case with WG5/SC22/J3. There are exceptions (like SIND, SINPI, &c.), but most new features in Fortran standards are committee inventions without prototypes, reference implementations, or official conformance test suites. This leads to incompatible implementations, and then lack of use in codes that need to be portable. It's a mess, really. I have a test suite of examples of this kind of thing that accumulated during the implementation of flang-new, in which it was a difficult task to figure out what portable Fortran really means in a way that's meaningful to users.

I'll defer to your expertise here. If C++'s experience with similar situations is any indication it really does not seem like a fun spot to be in.

Does make me curious how the dynamics of the Fortran/COBOL committees differs from that of the C/C++ committees.




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