smac@munmurra.mu.oz (Stuart McCormack) (12/20/88)
When last I played with (yuk) PRIMEs (1986), their FORTRAN was abysmal. The only good thing going for it was the debugger and that was, in any case, a separate product. A better, cheaper and faster option was the FORTRAN77 compiler from the University Of Salford in England. ( Distributed in Australia by Flinders University. ) This product was roughly one third the cost and benchmarked twice as fast in computation and approximately three times faster over basic I/O *without* the need for PRIME's rinky-dink run-time libraries. Very sexy! If you must run FORTRAN on PRIMEs, try this compiler. It remains the best F77 compiler I've used. P.S. Would you endorse my opinions?
djo7613@blake.acs.washington.edu (Dick O'Connor) (12/22/88)
I would agree totally. I've been running Salford Fortran on our Prime for four years now, and it's a *fine* compiler. An incredible array of compile-time and runtime options, all easily specified. Best part about Salford is that it gets out of your way! Set it up and (nearly) forget it's there. And for the inevitable crash-burn iterations, I have really come to appreciate the contents-of-variables dumps it gives. Many compilers do this, but Salford's is neat, quick and brief. Dick O'Connor Washington Department of Fisheries DISCLAIMER: I don't speak for WDF, and they agree to tolerate me.