From:	greve AT rs1 DOT thch DOT uni-bonn DOT de (Thomas Greve)
Subject:	Re: f2c
To:	kuku AT acds DOT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de (Christoph Kukulies)
Date:	Thu, 11 Jun 92 18:27:38 NFT
Cc:	djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu

> 
> On behalf of some disencouraging comments on f2c usage I want to leave
> a word 100% in contrary to these statements:
>
[stuff deleted]
> 
> Anyone still saying anything against f2c ?
> 

Yes, me. Maybe i've just used the wrong environment (pure DOS), and
outdated version of f2c (i took the DOS-executables from
trickle/simtel20) or just the wrong fortran program ;-)... but i had
nothing but trouble.

First: the program to be compiled was well running under VM/CMS and
could be compiled and ran fine with this rs6k's xlf. Ah yes. And a
smaller version (64x64 matrices instead of 1024x1024) compiled and ran
fine with MS-Fortran.

To be able to use djgcc, i threw out the SIGNAL-related stuff of the
libf77 (or libi77) as djgcc cannot handle them.  Afterwards the
libraries compiled with almost no modification.

But when i tried to run the compiled and linked stuff (*this* step
made no problem at all), i had severe trouble with IO-operations:
* Text supposed to appear on the screen appeard in a file called
  `fortran.1' or similar.
* an ASCII file which was read in without problems in the environment 
  mentioned abv., produced a (fatal) read error. Then i replaced the
  routine by an appropriate C routine. (i prefer C-style formatted IO
  to that !@#$% fortran formatted IO anyway ;-)
* a binary output file (that was larger than 64K -- but this should
  make no difference, should it? It is written out in chunks of 8K
  each) produced an obscure IO error `illegal error number'.

At this stage i dumped the whole fortran stuff and decided to start
from scratch. Strong optimizations had to be taken anyway and it was
impossible to work with the machine generated C code (even though one
can reach a lot with regular expressins :-)

Yes, i'm not an expert of fortran at all -- i strongly prefer 
C (++ or not). ;-)

				- Thomas

   greve AT rs1 DOT thch DOT uni-bonn DOT de
   unt145 AT dbnrhrz1

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