lipa@POLYA.STANFORD.EDU (William Lipa) (05/04/88)
I have had a chance to work the the Beta 2a version of Language Systems Corp.'s Fortran for the past week. This is a Fortran compiler that works within the MPW environment. There are good things and bad things about this Fortran. The good thing is that the MPW shell moves away from the graphical interface just enough to give the programmer more power, but not so much that it becomes difficult to use. Consequently, MPW Fortran is less frustrating to work with than Absoft Fortran, which (among many other things) suffers from a lack of indirect command files. The bad thing is that the compiler still has a ways to go before release. There are important bugs in the areas of: file input/output, expressions involving complex numbers, data statements, and functions which treat their return result as a variable to play around with. This is in addition to the bugs mentioned in the release note for this version, which affect adjustable arrays, block data subprograms, alternate returns from subprograms, and some compiler switches. Also, the compiler and the code it produces are quite slow. They hope to increase speed dramatically in the final release. I am excited by the potential of this product. It addresses many of the failings of the Absoft compilter. However, at this point it is not very useful because of the bugs. Bill Lipa lipa%polya@forsythe.stanford.edu