[Info-vax] modern Fortran on VMS

[Joukj]

Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> I don't know what Fortran is available on Itanium.  I think essentially
> that which is available on Alpha, basically Fortran 95. 
Correct


> 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.
just curious what that might have been for you.

The only thing I once needed from a newer Fortran-standard, was pointers 
to subroutines/functions. However, a work-around using integer*8 and 
DEC-pointers is easy.

>  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.
UGH, the revival of f2c? I hated to work with that years ago, but did 
not have an alternative on some machines lacking a Fortran-compiler.

Alternatively one could write some sort of preprocessor that rewrites 
the "new" features into a standard F95 code which the HP-compiler can 
handle (and optimize).

>  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?
Even if you can find those people, I think the project will be huge and 
only for less than 1% of the code that is to be written. I'm not sure if 
that is worth the effort.

> 
> 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?
That was before they sold out to INTEL.


                  Jouk