mccalpin@loligo (John McCalpin) (03/22/89)
We recently had our NeXT presentation here and are very excited about the machine. We do, however, have one very large reservation. The NeXT reps said that the only Fortran compiler available now is from Absoft. Well, we have lots of experience with Absoft Fortran on our Macintosh's, and we are not at all thrilled with the prospect of dealing with it on another machine - expecially one fast enough to encourage us to port large codes. Some questions: (1) Will the Absoft Fortran to GNU C interface be simple enough to be usable? If it requires any special declarations or re-ordering of the argument lists, then it is probably not usable for us. LOTS of PD software exists that expects fortran and C to interface as in BSD UNIX, and I don't want to have to re-write it.... (2) Absoft does have the very nice advantage that they are working on providing support for Fortran-88 array notation. Does anyone know if the NeXT version supports this? The ad I saw said the Mac II version with F88 support would be availble in the first quarter of this year. (3) Is there any word on the progress of the GNU fortran compiler? When this is finished, it will interface very easily with GNU C (and the debugger), and should produce very good code. (4) Are there any rumours about faster floating-point options for the NeXT? The 68882 is not fast enough for serious work. The NeXT rep hinted that something might be in the works at NeXT, but could not be more specific. I think it is great that NeXT wants to produce a machine useful for everybody at the university - engineers and philosophers alike - but the scientific/engineering applications are going to require a robust Fortran system and better floating-point performance than the current box provides. ---------------------- John D. McCalpin ------------------------ Dept of Oceanography & Supercomputer Computations Research Institute mccalpin@masig1.ocean.fsu.edu mccalpin@nu.cs.fsu.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------
phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu (03/23/89)
>(3) Is there any word on the progress of the GNU fortran compiler? I didn't even know of the existence of a gnu fortran project. Are you sure that there is one? >(4) Are there any rumours about faster floating-point options > for the NeXT? The 68882 is not fast enough for serious > work. I couldn't agree more---at least for my work. In fact, I am thinking about either buying a DEC PMAX (MIPS processor) which appears to be at least 4 times (!) as fast on floating point operations, or the NeXt. It would be important to me to be able to upgrade a NeXt to higher performance, so that I am not stuck with its flp performance when I will eventually really need it. Could anybody from NeXt comment inofficially as to what sort of confidence I can place in NeXt's current machine to eventually provide this functionality? Ivo Welch phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu PS: Could anybody tell me of their success with hooking up the $1300 380MB drive, please? Thanks.
w-colinp@microsoft.UUCP (Colin Plumb) (03/24/89)
phd_ivo@gsbacd.uchicago.edu wrote: > I didn't even know of the existence of a gnu fortran project. Are you > sure that there is one? The compiler is supposed to be able to take multiple front ends, although I'd expect some need for tweaking the first few times. Fortran, Pascal, Modula-2, Algol 60, Algol 68, and a bunch of other language parsers are on the FSF's wish list, but I don't know if there's any active work going on. If someone has the time (or a grad student :-}), a Fortran front end would be a worthwhile project. -- -Colin (uunet!microsoft!w-colinp) "Don't listen to me. I never do." - The Doctor