[Info-vax] GCC for VMS, was: Re: fortran compiler roadmap?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-04-22 16:44, Bob Koehler wrote:
> In article <nospam-627B0E.22215818042013 at news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>>
>> No.  This stuff came from the heritage of the first compiler available
>> for the VAX 11/780 being Fortran IV.  Among a heap of other stuff there
>> was a bunch of string handling routines which weren't necessary once
>> Fortran 77 arrived (and for new programs I used that).
>
>     Athough I'm not sure it met the ANSI Fortran-77 standard, the very
>     first Fortran compiler we had on our 11/780 under VMS 1.x did have
>     CHARACTER, block IF, ..., and all the other things we were looking
>     for in the -77 standard.  I think DEC was calling it Fortran-IV-Plus.

Indeed. Fortran-IV-Plus had a lot of things that ended up in the F77 
standard. F4P was pretty nice, but once F77 came out, DEC stopped the 
F4P compiler.

>     IIRC, Fortran-IV-Plus on RSX was pretty much the same, except with
>     built-in funtions instead of %LOC and %VAL, and even the Fortran-77
>     for RSX compiler didn't meet the standard with respect to using
>     LEN on passed CHARACTER arguments.

I thought the F4P on VMS was just the RSX compiler straight off. I 
thought it ran in compatibility mode.

Not sure what the standard says, but I've been bitten when moving code 
from VMS to RSX with regards to the LEN function. In RSX, LEN will give 
the size of the variable. Strings don't have dynamic length. And I'm not 
sure I understand how that was meant to work. If you say CHARACTER*80 
FOO, and the do a LEN(FOO), returning 80 seems pretty reasonable (no 
matter what stuff you have assigned to FOO).

(Was it called LEN, or ILEN, by the way?)

	Johnny