We have just heard the very sad news that Reinhold Bader, our co-author, died a few days ago, just after his 58th birthday.
We knew that his work was being interrupted by hospital visits but had no idea that his illness was life threatening.
We worked with him on the Fortran committees for many years and regarded him as a friend.
On WG5 he was a representative of DIN, the German standards organizationand, and twice acted as host to its meetings. Each was very successful, both inside and outside the conference room.
More recently he joined us as a co-author of the latest edition of Modern Fortran Explained
and was extremely helpful in getting this ready for publication.
Reinhold was the group leader for High-Performance Computing at the Leibniz Computer Centre in Munich, when he was taken ill in December, 2023. Nevertheless, he continued working on Fortran affairs, and in January submitted a list of DIN suggestions for F202Y, hoping they would make it onto the agenda of the WG5 meeting this summer.
Most notably, between February and May of this year, he worked on preparing a Wikipedia article on OO programming in Fortran. He was asked to announce when it was finished and published but, for reasons that are now clear, he never did. The draft article is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RBaSc/draft_ftnoo .
It is not quite complete, but does seem otherwise to be in very good shape, and it would be desirable to move it from a draft to a mainpage article with a proper title, such as Object-oriented Fortran.
Beforehand, experts here might like to read the article and make such changes as they deem necessary, especially to its final paragraphs. The Fortran community owes it to him to complete this task.
Reinhold was a valued colleague and friend, and we will sorely miss him.
Heartfelt condolences to Dr Bader’s family and friends and best wishes for some peace and comfort during these most trying times.
Dr Bader will be missed greatly, especially by high-performance computing domain and the Fortran Community
May the study and memories of Dr Bader’s many contributions including, if I’m not mistaken, to the enhanced interoperability with C in Fortran introduced starting Fortran 2008, inspire many, many a Fortranner to get involved in contributing themselves to Fortran and computing and to advance further and further the computational sciences.
From a distance, it would appear Dr Bader showed in his work the value of benefits, that is often immeasurable and quite high in the long-term, to advancing modern Fortran for computing and not be limited only to considering the costs which is a short term roadblock and can be overcome by working smartly and using better imagination and vision.
Condolences to all his family and friends. He will be missed. I did not know him well, but he and I had collaborated on a few things on the committee and it’s a shame to have lost his expertise.
It turns out that I was very naive to think that this draft article could be published with minor edits on Wikipedia. It fails to meet various criteria and I, at least, will not pursue this further. Even if it had been accepted, its reference to MFE would have been removed by a watchful wikicop, as that counts as self-promotion. (That is, BTW, why there is no reference to MFE in the main Fortran article.)
I can only suggest that someone be kind enough to copy the article to a more suitable and receptive site.
@m_b_metcalf Thanks for these efforts. I think high quality articles like these are best published as Markdown (or other source) documents somewhere (GitHub) where you can control it and collaborate on it with wide community. Only then publish somewhere, including Wikipedia. That way you are in control.
@m_b_metcalf I saved an initial copy (i.e. the text, the two illustrations) in their original formats on a GitHub repository. I would agree to work on the early conversions with pandoc to either GitHub flavored markdown (link) or an initial pdf without illustrations (link) for a more form more appealing for text, snippets of code, and illustrations.
Edit: the project’s main branch contains the incrementally linted/reformatted files.