[Info-vax] modern Fortran on VMS

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

I don't know what Fortran is available on Itanium.  I think essentially
that which is available on Alpha, basically Fortran 95.  If VMS is
ported to some other hardware, then good compilers supporting the latest 
language standards would be nice to have.  (Personally, Fortran 95 does 
almost all I need, though I did recently run across something which is 
more elegant using a Fortran2003 feature, though there is a workaround 
in Fortran95.  However, in general the latest standard should be 
supported.)  Also, it might be nice to have some non-HP Fortran compiler 
on VMS which supports a newer standard.  While I doubt the code would be 
as efficient and support for the VMS debugger would probably not be 
worth doing, it would be nice to be able to stay on VMS if one really 
needs more modern features (otherwise, the HP compiler could still be 
used, of course).

The easiest way to do this would probably be to have some program which 
converts the Fortran source to some other language and compiles that.  
But this is also probably the worst solution.  Are the various bits and 
pieces documented well enough that someone with sufficient knowledge of 
VMS etc but with no non-public knowledge could produce a compiler which 
would produce object files from Fortran source directly, like the HP 
compiler does?

Many people used to use Fortran on VMS, and VMS Fortran used to be the 
gold standard of Fortran compilers.  Is there any hope of regaining at 
least some of that glory?