With LLMs, should Fortran have more built-in procedures and delete more legacy features?

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LLMs will do an increasing share of coding. I think that strengthens the case for more built-in procedures, for two reasons:

  • instead of LLMs creating the same procedures repeatedly, they can be instructed to use procedures from the Fortran 20xx standard when available
  • the cost of adding intrinsic procedures to a compiler has fallen

C++ for example, has many non-uniform RNG, listed at C++ TR1 random number generation notes . Should some of them be in the Fortran standard, especially common ones such as the normal and uniform integer distributions? Standard Fortran has ordinary but not modified Bessel functions. I would like to have the latter. There are probably other special functions people want.

More controversially, with LLMs good at fixing code and writing tools to fix code, I think the standards committee should be more aggressive about deleting legacy features such as implicit mapping.

If it is too late to change the feature set of Fortran 2028, proposals can be made for Fortran 2034. I could work on an expanded RNG proposal if there is interest.

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I agree. Basic stuff like random number generators, mean, standard deviation, logsum should be intrinsic functions.

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You could ask an LLM to do that part too. :slight_smile: Ideally you could feed it past C++ and Fortran standard proposals, to match the style and expectations of these proposals.

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