[mod.computers.vax] ANSI F77, VAX F77, C

SCHOMAKE@HNYKUN53.BITNET.UUCP (01/07/87)

(Roger Hauck (ROGER@CFA2.BITNET) writes:)

> I have a user who is looking for a Fortran to C conversion utility.  He has
> heard of a commercial program called Fortrix, but it costs several
> thousand dollars, and that isn't the scale he is looking for.....

Please could anyone forward to me interesting hints with respect to such
a translator. I have been using DEC's VAX FORTRAN-77 with much pleasure
but I am sad to see there is absolutely no such luxurious thing on
other machines. The distance between ANSI FORTRAN-77 and VAX FORTRAN-77
may be some 600 error messages on a 1700 line program as I noticed with

$ FORT/STANDARD some_prog

This is no criticism on DEC's VAX FORTRAN. I consider it to be a very
good implementation of the language. But if you remove DEC's features and
stick to the apparent "standard", you end up with ugly anachronistic
GOTO and EQUIVALENCE contraptions in UPPER CASE with six-character
variable and module names. What's more: it will be very difficult to
find a nice FORTRAN-77 for microcomputers that _fully_ implements even
this limited ANSI standard. I have seen some F77 implementations
for MS-DOS and the Atari 1040 ST but I don't like them at all.

For portability reasons, I am considering to revert to C. Please send
reactions and hints to me personally since I don't want to clutter the net.
If enough interesting ideas pop up, they will be summarized in a
digest.

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      KKKKKUUUUNNNNN
      KKK  UUUU NNNN           Lambert Schomaker
      K    UUUU  NNN           SCHOMAKER@HNYKUN53.BITNET
      KKK  UUUU   NN           Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
      KKKKK UU     N