On Sun, 3 Feb 2019 at 16:00, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:

> BTW:  this attitude was nothing new.  I've said it before, the greatest
> piece of marketing DEC ever did was convince the world that VMS Fortran was
> Fortran-77.  It was not close.   And when you walked into most people
> writing real production code (in Fortran of course), you discovered they
> had used all of the VMS Fortran extensions.   When the UNIX folks arrived
> on the scene the f77 in Seventh Edition was not good enough.  You saw first
> Masscomp in '85, then a year later Apollo and 2 years after that, Sun
> develop really, really good Fortran's -- all that were VMS Fortran
> compatible.
>

This code was apparently so pervasive and long-lived that the GNU Fortran
compiler added compatibility for DEC extensions less than two years ago, in
version 7.  There must be enough demand for DEC's additions to have made it
worthwhile.

-Henry