The issue with implicit none not being the default is not “a minor bug in some one’s ear”. There has been tremendous cost associated with it, countless hours of valuable time of scientists and engineers, etc. have been lost due to the issues that arise when the statement is inadvertently omitted.
Please see this thread: For whom Fortran? For what? - #20 by FortranFan
And note the several group situations where Fortran gets practiced. Again and again, the matters with Fortran come down to “For whom Fortran”? The deterrence implied by @macneacail 's comment - one that goes beyond a silence to not support the suggestion I linked upthread - is most unfortunate, it tries to influence based on certain groups e.g., (3) involving one-person or small team in certain domain (say academia) above others, say, group (2) and (4) where a default implicit none will be highly valuable.
I have taken great care to suggest something that is really low, low cost but which has great benefits whilst providing backwards compatibility to most codebases. For example,
- those who like
implicit nonein every program-unit / module can continue doing so - no impact to them - those who like
implicit integer(..), ..statements of the yore can continue using them - no impact to them either.
Comments by the likes of @macneacail such as “We have more important Fortran problems to solve” - as though the mere suggestion to make implicit none the default somehow prevents others from solving other problems in Fortran is so pretentious and distorted and which then overlooks the broader picture and the needs with the bigger tent approach are more reflective of the crabs-in-a-barrel syndrome that appears to afflict Fortran acutely which then feeds somewhat into the kinds of blogs in the original post.