druid@inuxf.UUCP (Larry Marcus) (07/02/87)
PC WEEK magazine for June 30 carried an article on page 4 about the "bug-infested version 4.0" [sic] of Microsoft Fortran for the PC. The article says there are supposed to be "134 known bugs" [sic] in release 4.0 and that 4.01 will be shipped in 30 days, fixing 123 of the bugs. What types of problems have people been experiencing? I called Microsoft and they said that a mailing spelling out the update policy would go out to registered 4.0 owners about the end of July. I assume the update will be free (<-- big assumption). Larry Marcus AT&T Consumer Products Indianapolis
garrett@udel.EDU (Joel Garrett) (07/02/87)
We have been using the MS 4.0 compiler for development work here at the Center for Composite Materials for a little over two months. Most of the problems we've had were with the compiler itself (ie the FL command and not the code it produces). The compiler seems to be very intolerant of memory-resident software, which can be a real drag when you've gotten used to using things like Chris Dunford's CED (command-line editor) and Arbor- Soft's SEARCH (PATH-type command for non exe files). We've also had a few problems with being able to read and write binary files. The binary files read/write ok, but the machine hangs when a stop statement is executed. There are also some 'annoyances' that I've run into while using the Codeview debugger with the compiler (besides lack of speed in compiling/linking :-). The real problem is that if you have something like a divide by zero or something like that in your program, the fortran runtime library will trap the error and halt execution, which wipes out the ability to check variables and do a traceback check. All you see on the screen is a message to the effect that execution terminated NORMALLY (!) 4.0 is a big improvement for us over 3.3 since we can now port more of our stuff from the VAX, but these little annoyances all add up to almost be a real bother. Joel Garrett Research Associate Center for Composite Materials University of Delaware (garrett@louie.udel.edu)
singer@XN.LL.MIT.EDU (Matthew R. Singer) (07/02/87)
In article <309@louie.udel.EDU>, garrett@udel.EDU (Joel Garrett) writes: > > . > . > . > 4.0 is a big improvement for us over 3.3 since we can now port more of our > stuff from the VAX, but these little annoyances all add up to almost be a > real bother. > > Joel Garrett > Research Associate > Center for Composite Materials > University of Delaware > (garrett@louie.udel.edu) In a recent article in PC week, mention was made that MS was aware of something on the order of 130 bugs in MS Fortran 4.0. They claim to have fixed 120 (or so) of them. This will be shipped as 4.1 in about 30-60 days. You would think they fix all the ones they knew about... M. Singer