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