jochterski@eagle.wesleyan.edu (08/16/90)
re:
AUTHOR = {Russell K. Jones and Tracy Crabtree},
TITLE = {Fortran Tools},
PUBLISHER = {John Wiley and Sons},
YEAR = {1988},
NOTE = {ISBN: 0 471 61976 0 LC: QA76.73.F25J66 1989}
>1) Has anyone read it yet who might be willing to review (in email or
> on the net) it read it yet? If not, and IF I get a chance to read
> it in the next two weeks, I'll review it (assuming others are
> interested).
I picked this book up at the library last year, and liked it. I program
proficiently in a couple of languages, and was just starting fortran. I was
disgruntled at the time with string handling and I/O in fortran. (i.e. I didn't
want to write my own floating pt. to ascii (ftoa) conversion.) F.T. came to the
rescue in a big way. The first several chapters are dedicated to I/O and string
manipulation.
The tools in these chapters have been very useful to me, and will be to anyone
building a (or looking for additions to) a library of tools. Some tools for
included string manipulation are ftoa, atof, itoa ..etc, escape sequence
handling, string equivalence testing, and some other things of that sort. In
the file I/O chapter there is a whole set of file management tools. E.g. fopen,
fclose, falloc, fdealloc etc.
I couldn't afford the source code (more on prices below) already typed in so I
had to enter the routines straight from the text. I had only one problem doing
this, other than the amount of time it took. I had to change the way command
line input was read, due to priviledge restrictions on our system. I can send
the new version to anyone who needs it. In general, these routines are
extremely useful, and I use them in all my code now.
There are other parts of the book, which I've read or scanned, but aren't
useful to my work now. These include lexical analysis, hash tables and a simple
programming language. The book also includes a preprocessor, which looks alot
like a C preprocessor eg. DEFINE UNDEFINE IFDEF INCLUDE. It can also produce
F77 style code.
If you need tools like these, I _highly_ recommend this book. I finally bought
a copy ($32.95) from the local bookstore.
>2) Has anyone got their machine-readable sources? Errors or problems
> in using them? Outside of VMS or MS-DOS environments?
Their sources are available as follows:
6250 BPI tape $99
TK50 $99
MSDOS diskette $49 (no size mentioned)
I should mention that the source for MSDOS is in an appendix in the book. I
don't know whether the media mentioned include both versions on each type (DOS
& VMS).
They are available from:
Tools Source Code Media
PO Box 1294
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266
Joe Ochterski
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