[Info-vax] Fortran

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2018-12-07 17:05:36 +0000, Dave Froble said:

> Coding style can have a lot to do with understand code.

Some of the recent efforts around automated refactoring work 
surprisingly well, and source code formatters are a common feature of 
development tools.  The vendor tools for source code development on 
OpenVMS are lacking here, unfortunately.

> I knew a couple of guys who bragged to the head of customer support one 
> day that no one would understand their code.  His response, "then whet 
> good is it?".

A rather more impolitic though arguably better response here might have 
been "then what good are you?".

> I once ran across some code that had been added to some of my programs. 
>   I had to believe that it was deliberately formatted to be as 
> unreadable as possible.  Just a mass of characters, all run together, 
> no CR and such.  A compiler could read it, a human really could not.

I've seen blocks of character blobbage arising secondary to 
record-formatting and line-wrappage differences.  Various of the 
OpenVMS sequential file formats aren't known for portability.

Source code formatters are a common solution here, and I've routinely 
recommended embedding a source code formatter into the check-in hooks 
in the local source code control system.

By contemporary standards, BASIC and most other OpenVMS languages lack 
development environment and development tool support.  Including 
formatting.  Last I checked, LSEDIT lacks this capability.

Neil Rieck has available a formatter for BASIC on OpenVMS, though I've 
not tried it:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/demo_vms_html/source_code_formatter_bas.html

C and some other languages can be fed into the Artistic Style (astyle) 
source code formatter port for OpenVMS, as has been discussed before.  
The OpenVMS astyle port is old and recent versions are reportedly 
subtly incompatible with the OpenVMS C++ implementation.

On other platforms and for the languages that it supports, clang has 
some good tools available.  The diagnostics I'm seeing out of clang 
easily rival those of OpenVMS.  When combined with an IDE, it's 
becoming easier and faster to code for OpenVMS on another platform, and 
to then port over the code.  The automatic source code refactoring is 
really quite slick.







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