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

[Paul Sture]

In article <ddkowNAuCppz at eisner.encompasserve.org>,
 koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org (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.
>    
>    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.

To be honest I don't remember the exact flavour of Fortran our 11/780 
with V2.1 onwards had.  However we were working with a couple of 
utilitiews which generated record definitions from a data library and 
assumed that Fortran wanted to see strings as byte arrays.  These 
utilities also ran on RSX with the aim of being able to compile apps on 
both platforms.  Avoiding CHARACTER may have been a consequence of that.

But then again in those days, amongst the colleagues who developed those 
utilities I also came across a lack of comprehension about outputting 
string data in non-Fortran languages.  The assumption seemed to be that 
every language required an equivalent of the Fortran Format statement.

-- 
Paul Sture