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Date:      Sun, 4 Feb 1996 12:14:30 +0100 (MET)
From:      Christoph Kukulies <kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
To:        stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua (Andrew V. Stesin)
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD f77 -- what's it?
Message-ID:  <199602041114.MAA10799@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de>
In-Reply-To: <199602031630.SAA22690@office.elvisti.kiev.ua> from "Andrew V. Stesin" at Feb 3, 96 06:30:48 pm

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> 
> An interested person asked me -- what is f77 (1) in FreeBSD-2.1?
> 
> My first guess was: I doubt this is a "real" Fortran77 compiler,
> probably it's a stub for f2c (1), esp. considering a real GNU f77 in
> the ports collection".

FreeBSD's f77 is a shell script (compiler driver) for f2c,
a portable f77 compiler by S. (Stu) Feldman, AT&T.
(Obtainable from research.att.com - may be now netlib.att.com://netlib/f2c)

Stop, it is no longer a shell script, Jonas Olsen has written/modified
the gnu f77 compiler driver (f77.c) to use f2c as the 
systems fortran compiler.


I'm using it for several years now to port large fortran projects
to different platforms and it is IMHO 'the standard' - I haven't
seen any better f77 compiler yet with regard to language definition
trueness and also what bugs is concerned. It has really been
thrown at any kind of ugly fortran/fortranIV code through a period of
a decade or so and I would say it is some kind of 99.99% bug free. 

The latter you cannot say for g77 (gnu fortran) which still 
needs some time for bugs to be shaken out. I cannot speak about
code compactness here but I don't see any redundance in what
f2c is doing, namely converting f77 to C and then compiling
the result by GNU C or some other C compiler since the data
structures are quite the same whether it be C structs or
fortran commons. Maybe a 'true' fortran compiler can be a bit
better at optimization. But remember, it will take some time
until g77 reaches the quality of f2c and I wouldn't vote for
making g77 the default f77 compiler for FreeBSD for the above
reasons.

> where /usr/bin/f77's sources are. A rather small executable is
> here, works Ok, but meither manpage nor source code were located.

/usr/src/gnu/usr.bin/cc/f77/f77.1


> 
> What's wrong with me? :)
> 
> The system is FreeBSD-2.1.0-951026-SNAP
> 
> -- 
> 
> 	With best regards -- Andrew Stesin.
> 
> 	+380 (44) 2760188	+380 (44) 2713457	+380 (44) 2713560
> 
> 	"You may delegate authority, but not responsibility."
> 					Frank's Management Rule #1.
> 

--Chris Christoph P. U. Kukulies kuku@gil.physik.rwth-aachen.de



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