[comp.lang.fortran] Looking for some User Interface package for IBM PC's

kseethar@hal.ulowell.edu (Krishnan Seetharaman) (04/17/91)

This is for a friend of mine who is using Microsoft FORTRAn on his PC to
develop some programs. He now wants to build a user interface (menus etc..)
around it. It can be under MS Windows or otherwise. 

Is there some sort of a library that he can use ? Does MS Windows have
a FORTRAN interface ? What approach should be taken ? Any pointers on this 
would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Krishnan


-- 
K. Seetharaman                         | email : kseethar@cs.ulowell.edu
Graphics Research Laboratory,          | Tel   : 508-934-3612
Department of Computer Science         | 
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sichermn@beach.csulb.edu (Jeff Sicherman) (04/17/91)

In article <1991Apr16.200649.21062@ulowell.ulowell.edu> kseethar@hal.ulowell.edu (Krishnan Seetharaman) writes:
>This is for a friend of mine who is using Microsoft FORTRAn on his PC to
>develop some programs. He now wants to build a user interface (menus etc..)
>around it. It can be under MS Windows or otherwise. 
>
>Is there some sort of a library that he can use ? Does MS Windows have
>a FORTRAN interface ? What approach should be taken ? Any pointers on this 
>would be greatly appreciated.
>

  There are a few Fortran libraries around but most, in my experience,
are for o/s and hardware access (since fortran lacks them), not for making
fancy user interfaces. (After all, fortran is used by engineers and they
dont need fancy user interfaces, just a command line :-).

   However, MS Fortran (recent versions) have interlanguage calling
capability to other MS languages (and compatibles ?) including assembler
Pascal and C. With due attention to the equivalence of data types and
structures, he ought to be able to find one of the many C libraries
at SIMTEL compiled for MSC that could be called from the Fortran
program. If he finds a suitable one, please report back to the newgroup;
could save some of us the search effort.

Jeff Sicherman

gt4512c@prism.gatech.EDU (BRADBERRY,JOHN L) (04/17/91)

In article <1991Apr17.045848.5706@beach.csulb.edu> sichermn@beach.csulb.edu (Jeff Sicherman) writes:
>In article <1991Apr16.200649.21062@ulowell.ulowell.edu> kseethar@hal.ulowell.edu (Krishnan Seetharaman) writes:
>>This is for a friend of mine who is using Microsoft FORTRAn on his PC to
>>develop some programs. He now wants to build a user interface (menus etc..)
>>around it. It can be under MS Windows or otherwise. 
>>
>>Is there some sort of a library that he can use ? Does MS Windows have
>>a FORTRAN interface ? What approach should be taken ? Any pointers on this 
>>would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>
>  There are a few Fortran libraries around but most, in my experience,
>are for o/s and hardware access (since fortran lacks them), not for making
>fancy user interfaces....
>
>   However, MS Fortran (recent versions) have interlanguage calling
>capability to other MS languages (and compatibles ?) including assembler
>Pascal and C. 

<< stuff deleted >>
>
Actually, Microsoft has an upcoming release of Fortran (version
5.1 - due this summer I think) that has a DIRECT interface to
Microsoft windows. Instead of the mixed language approach or the
C/SDK driver option, you can use a few supplied extensions to the
standard FILE operations such as OPEN(...) and CLOSE(...) to open
parent and child windows. They refer to this as 'QuickWindows'.
Hooks into the Windows environment are provided automatically at
link time.

I have tested this using their Fortran beta release and it works
quite well. Dr. Dobbs Journal will have an issue on the Fortran GUI
interface in the June issue.

The important thing to note is that as the GUI interface becomes
more 'standard', it will evolve into more of a 'generic' high level
I/O device type. In many cases, opening and closing windows can be
compared to opening and closing files. As in the case of file I/O,
low level interface into GUI's will provided by higher level calls
available in Fortran...

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