------- Additional Comments From fca at mail dot cern dot ch 2005-04-08 07:14 ------- Subject: Re: Function entries and entries with alternate returns not implemented
Dear All, I think that the tone of the conversation is evolving in the wrong direction (I might have been partially responsible for it). Now the situation is the following: - There is a large community that needs FORTRAN (77 + 95). There is a widespread attitude that "FORTRAN is dead". I do not agree, however, if it was true, the millions lines of legacy FORTRAN that people need are far from dead. - g77, after some pain and suffering, evolved to be a reasonable FORTRAN compiler. Now we suddenly (at least me) learn that it will not be maintained any more. Which means that it is dead. May be not yet, but it is clear that we cannot expect it to be around for a long time for Linux. For those using Mac's the situation is even more serious because Tiger will come out with gcc4. - We tried out the designed successor and found it very immature. In fact it is not even a proper FORTRAN compiler because it does not implement the standard. Then we started the usual interaction with the developers. And here things started to degrade. On one side we ignored how thin is this group of developers. So we were a bit demanding in our approach. On the other side the developers gave us the impression to not understand how serious the situation is for us. - The moral of the story is that the developers need some help, which I cannot provide, because I am not a compiler expert (!). However I imagine that there must be some people out there that have the knowledge and the ability to react to the "save the gcc suite!" cry. So I would suggest to activate our contacts and to find out if someone has the possibility to look into gFortran and provide some patches for the problems that are high priority for us. Of course this requires some good will from the developers to check and introduce these patches. - Last but not least I wonder if the "g95 split" is really definitive. The community would profit enormously from this split to be mended. My personal experience in this kind of business makes me rather pessimist. Let me know if it makes sense to you. Best regards, Federico On Fri, 8 Apr 2005, kargl at gcc dot gnu dot org wrote: > > ------- Additional Comments From kargl at gcc dot gnu dot org 2005-04-08 > 01:21 ------- > (In reply to comment #25) > > > > I do not understand your tone. There is a compiler, g77, which works and > > implements at least the Fortran 77 standard. I don't see any reason why it > > should be replaced in the distribution by a compiler which is not yet mature > > enough to implement the same standard. > > Are you aware of the fact that g77 *is completely* broken with > respect to the gcc-4.x branch? There is no one who is going to > fix the problem because the effort to fix g77 is estimated to > be equilavent to implementing an actually F95 compiler. > > > The attitude expressed in "piss off the people who owe you nothing" > > can be very bad for the future of Linux. > > I don't use linux. Never have, never will. I use FreeBSD on an > AMD64 platform where there are no commercially available F95 compilers. > I have zero compiler writing experience, yet you'll find that I've > contributed 69 patches to make gfortran work. Those patches came > about because I need a compiler, and I decided to contribute something > to GCC other than whining and making disparaging remarks. I don't > know about my fellow contributors, but I find that I have little > motivation to continue to work on gfortran occur when indivudals > come here to tell us that gfortran is useless. > > > > > > -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13082
