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

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Bob Koehler <koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org> 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.

WATFIV had CHARACTER and block IF in about 1973. People working on
the standard knew what things would look like, and might have wanted
to test them out.

As I remember it, the early VAX/VMS compilers ran in compatibility
mode, so maybe not so different from the RSX compilers.
   
>   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.

It seems to have taken a special fixup in the VMS linker to make it work.

-- glen