[Info-vax] Fortran

[abrsvc]

On Tuesday, December 4, 2018 at 8:10:31 AM UTC-5, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2018-12-03, Galen <gltackett at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Probably a GE die-hards still using the three-branch IF as well? ;-)
> 
> I really hope there's no-one bemoaning the demise of Hollerith constants. :-)

Well...

The loss of support of this has caused some pain.  In order to "upgrade" to I64 and beyond, I had to remove many lines of code because of this.  Also, the loss of octal constant support created some busy work too. Realize that a large portion of the code base was initially created on a PDP-11 system in FORTRAN and has been updated/modified since.  Starting with the F90 compilers, the octal constants went bye-bye. Not a difficult thing to change, but a pain in a code base that exceeds 1 Million lines.  What made things worse is that this code is governed by the FDA which means that each change must be documented (code line commented out and replacement under it with a reason for the change).

The funny thing is that the resultant code remained the same.  Did a binary compare to prove that there were no changes to the code to get by a 510K inspection.  Had to prove that the change was a cosmetic one and not a "real" code change.

The removal of Hollerith constants is ongoing in anticipation of the loss of support for those in future compilers.

Dan