DLLOYD@TUCC.BITNET (10/14/87)
I have recently ported a graphics subroutine package to the Atari for use with Absoft Fortran (the one you can also get from Microsoft. The package is for drawing in 2-D integer space or 2-D and 3-D real space on any domain. Also has a hidden line capability and system calls to dump a screen to a DEGAS format file and to move screens around in memory. I have uploaded the .FL files and documentation to GEnie. If there is interest on the net, please e-mail me at DLLOYD@TUCC
fortney@dukehep.hep (11/16/87)
Absoft fortran is sold under the name AC/Fortran and is available from Microsoft. I do not know of a European source, but the company address in the US is Absoft Fortran, 4268 N. Woodward, Royal Oak, Michigan 48072 The telephone number is (313) 549-7111. L. R. Fortney, Physics Dept. Duke Univ DLLOYD@TUCC.bitnet or FORTNEY@FNAL.bitnet
fortney@dukehep.hep (11/19/87)
My apologies if this is a repeat. I believe you can find this fortran marketed as AC/Fortran by dealers who can get Microsoft products. The root address is: Absoft Corporation, 2781 Bond Street, Auburn Hills, Michigan 48057 USA. The price is about US$150. Lloyd R. Fortney, Physics Dept, Duke Univ DLLOYD@TUCC.bitnet
FXDDR@ALASKA.BITNET (01/24/88)
Thanks to the leads provided by people here, I was able to make contact with Absoft. Turns out there are two reasons why AC/Fortran is a little hard to find: (1) Absoft moved recently, and (2) apparently sales to ST users have been underwhelming. Anyhow, one distributor is Computer Creations, PO Box 493, Dayton, Ohio, 45459 (advertisements in STart). It is also available from Absoft directly at their current address: Absoft 2781 Bond Street Auburn Hills, Michigan 48057 Ph (313) 853-0050 They want $199 for it...Computer Creations wants $129. The flyer they sent is annoyingly amigoid. At the top it says "ANSI FORTRAN 77 Compiler with Debugger for Amiga" and down in the description it says "AC/FORTRAN is the standard...for MC68000 based personal computers (Macintosh, Amiga, Hewlett-Packard Integral PC, etc)." The only clue that they support the ST is the statement "It...includes several Atari ST productivity tools such as...." No wonder the ST sales are slow...the casual reader wouldn't even notice that an ST version is available! Oh well, the marketing folks can't all be geniuses. Thanks for the assistance, Don Rice FXDDR@ALASKA PS: Thanks Ravi, I think you are the only one I couldn't get a reply to.
btb@ncoast.UUCP (Brad Banko) (01/30/88)
about fortran on the ST... i got some info from absoft that was a little more informative about its availability on the ST, but the main point is that absoft fortran supports the ST much the same way that absoft fortran works with the macintosh (i used absoft fortran on a mac back in 1984.)... absoft supplies one single hook into the operating system calls through which all gem stuff passes, etc. absoft fortran on the mac was a very decent system, and having the inside mac docs available (at the time) and the relatively friendly (compared to GEM) mac toolbox, making toolbox calls wasn't too painful, but on the st (i have mark williams C) i think that it is much more difficult to access GEM in this way. my one complaint about the info from absoft is that they charge a nominal fee ($100/yr) for a license (?) to distribute their runtime library with the applications that you develop. another fortran that looks somewhat more practical (to me) is made by PECAN software in Brooklyn New York... they supply a turtlegraphics library for simple graphics applications AND they make their fortran with turtlegraphics available for a wide variety of machines including ibm pc's, pdp's, amiga's, etc. (actually, it sounds almost too good to be true, and all of this i've taken only from their literature (which looks very professional).) this should mean that one could develop applications using their turtlegraphics on an ST, and then be able to very easily port the application to other machines just by recompiling it on the target system with their compiler for that system. even microsoft doesn't supply a decent graphics library for their languages (except the new graphics primitives in msc 5.0). pecan's phone number is: (718)-851-3100. they look like an american extension of an english software company. brad banko (btb@ncoast.uucp) -- Brad Banko Columbus, Ohio (formerly ...!decvax!cwruecmp!ncoast!btb) btb%ncoast@mandrill.cwru.edu "The only thing we have to fear on this planet is man." -- Carl Jung, 1875-1961
XBR3D815@DDATHD21.BITNET (WERNER BRAUN, FB08 KERNCHEMIE) (02/17/88)
Can some kind soul give me some information about the price and the number of the current version of Absoft Fortran for the ST ? Werner
JOHNBARNES@ENH.NIST.GOV (12/01/89)
I understand your problem with the Absoft Librarian. A collegue of mine has persuaded me to try Prospero Fortran because it supports libraries from mixed languages. Prospero C and Prospero Pascal routines are supposedly easy to incorporate into Prospero Fortran executables. The GEM bindings for Prospero Fortran also appear to be much cleaner than those for Absoft. Given these factors and an absence of support for the ST from Absoft, my next programming venture will use Prospero rather than Absoft. I don't know whether you have invesigated Prospero Fortran or not. If anyone has had contrary experience I would hope that they would speak up. Could you please describe Erlgraph? I am keenly interested in a good FORTRAN graphics package and I might be willing to help with development and/or testing. This is being posted openly rather than as direct mail to see if it smokes anyone out of the woodwork.
york@altger.UUCP (york) (12/03/89)
I also understand your problems. Some of them may be solved by using the 'script' commando from the library manager. May be, the linker also has cuch a command. There is still no way to do it via command line options. But it is even worse. Recently I tried to impement the NAG graphics library (*only* about 350 routines). For I had impemented it before on my UN*X system, I created two one pass libaries (using the output of lorder and tsort) on my ST. The linker map told me, that no routine was missing. So I started the test program. There was neither a label, nor a loop construct in the main program, but the code managed to build up a never ending loop. Ok, I took the linker map from the ST and concatenated all modules which should be neccessary to build the program to one file. I compiled and started the program. I was somewhat surprised, that the run-time link-loader now told me, that one routine was missing. To make the long story shorter: The linker had found about 22 modules in the libraries, but additional 25 ones had to be linked to build a working program. Conclusion: The compiler of Absort Fortran may be nice, but beware of the linker. May be I 'll be using the Prospero product despite its longer compilation and linking times. Ulrich Liesenfeld s=uli; ou=analyt; ou=chemie; p=uni-bochum; a=dbp; c=de;
Ritzert@DMZRZU71.BITNET (12/07/89)
> I also understand your problems. Some of them may be solved by > using the 'script' commando from the library manager. May be, the > linker also has cuch a command. There is still no way to do it via > command line options. Well, do You really have a library manager with a script command? Mine doesn't have one. At least it is not documented. There is a serious bug in the compiler (version 2.3): If You want to use a common block only in some subroutines You have to declare it in Your main program. Otherwise You will get unpredictable results. This is the only Fortran compiler I have used which behaves this way (and I have been writing Fortran programs on many systems). Michael Ritzert mjr@dmzrzu71.bitnet
news@blackbird.afit.af.mil (News System Account) (12/07/89)
In article <891207024528.958022@DMZRZU71-UNI-MAINZ--GERMANY> Ritzert@DMZRZU71.BITNET writes: > There is a serious bug >in the compiler (version 2.3): > >If You want to use a common block only in some subroutines You have to >declare it in Your main program. Otherwise You will get unpredictable >results. This is the only Fortran compiler I have used which behaves >this way (and I have been writing Fortran programs on many systems). > >Michael Ritzert >mjr@dmzrzu71.bitnet This is not a bug. The FORTRAN standard does not require that a common block that is first initialized in a subroutine be saved after the subroutine is exited; although, most FORTRAN implementations do save it. (Sorry, I can't quote the Standard but you can see, for instance, Michael Metcalf's Effective Fortran 77, page 83.) If you would like to keep the common block around and don't want to clutter up the main program by declaring it there use the save command: subroutine foo(args) real args,stuff common/bar/stuff SAVE /bar/ . . . This should work (at least it does in compiler version 2.2). (It sure is nice to finally see some discussion on a real programming language in this newsgroup :-) David E. Bell dbell@galaxy-43.UUCP dbell@afit-ab.arpa
t19@nikhefh.nikhef.nl (Geert J v Oldenborgh) (12/08/89)
In article <891207024528.958022@DMZRZU71-UNI-MAINZ--GERMANY>, Ritzert@DMZRZU71.BITNET writes: > Well, do You really have a library manager with a script command? Mine > doesn't have one. > > If You want to use a common block only in some subroutines You have to > declare it in Your main program. Otherwise You will get unpredictable > results. > > Michael Ritzert Ad 1). An input redirection from a decent shell should do the trick (my makefiles do something like 'echo "a $whatever" > aap; f77lib lib < aap') Ad 2). This is as defined in the Standard, though Absoft seems to be the only one taking the liberty. The 'SAVE' option might work, I always have a main program with all common blocks which just calls the former main as a subroutine. Much easier debugging too. New ). I cowrote a little linker for Absoft which is ~30 times faster than theirs and does not have the EXTERNAL bug. It is commandline oriented because I use 'make' all the time. The only feature lacking is support for BLOCK DATA in libraries. Would there be interest in this as a shareware product? Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, NIKHEF-H
york@altger.UUCP (york) (12/17/89)
In article <891207024528.958022@DMZRZU71-UNI-MAINZ--GERMANY> Ritzert@DMZRZU71.BITNET writes: >Well, do You really have a library manager with a script command? Mine >doesn't have one. At least it is not documented. There is a serious bug >in the compiler (version 2.3): > I have checkd it: There is really no script command. I had used input redirection to build my libraries. I hear there is revision 2.3 available ? Where did you get it ? About bugs: The COMMON feature isn't a bug, but you may try: character line*80 read (*,'(a)',end=9010) line and answer with a carriage return only. Compiler revision 2.2 will branch to the label 9010. By the way, what is the actual release of Prospero Fortran ? Greetings to all uli
p34@nikhefh.nikhef.nl (Paul van Deurzen) (12/20/89)
> The original posting told us about the 'abnormal' behaviour regarding the > use of common blocks in Absoft's implementation of Fortran. By far the simplest way to cure the 'abnormal', ie. non-IBM, Cray, VAX etc. behaviour of Absoft's Fortran is to set the 'H' option. This not only enables weird F66 features like 'extended range DO loops' but also let the compiler treat all variable storage as STATIC. In other words: you no longer have to define all your commons in main. In addition it saves local variables and thus constructs like: data init/0/ if (init .eq. 0) then ...initialise.... init = 1 else ...do something... endif will behave as expected, ie. only initialise once. (I didn't say I like this way of initialising...).