cxb@lanl.gov (Clay P Booker) (08/13/90)
I recently received the new MacFortran II from Absoft. I had been reasonably happy with the old MacFortran/020 from them; while that Fortran has a clunky Macintosh interface to the ToolBox, it was fine for typical Fortran programming, and it would accept 99% of my mainframe code (from a Cray under CTSS) that I ported to it. It also had a nice symbolic debugger. From the descriptions in the literature announcing the new MacFortran II, I expected an interface along the lines of Think C which I consider to a very friendly programming environment. Instead, when it arrived, I discovered that it had, for me, several flaws: 1. It requires a Mac II or SE/30 with at least 2 MBytes of RAM. As a result, the old PlusU and even the current SEUs in my group cannot upgrade. 2. It REQUIRES MPW to run. I consider this a real hardship. (a). First off the MPW folder with Fortran requires 3.8 MBytes on my harddisk. (b). The old symbolic debugger is gone, and I must learn how do the equivalent, if there is one, in MPW. (c). I need to learn the MPW interface to use it properly which in my work is a waste of time. I and others in my group use Fortran (or any other language) as a tool to get results. 3. IUm told by a friend who has already tried programming with it that the compiler is VERY slow. As a result, I will be looking into competetorsU Fortrans to replace this new Absoft version. This upgrade to MacFortran II has been a waste of money for my company. -- Clay Booker (cxb@lanl.gov) Los Alamos National Laboratory (505) 665-3065