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Is GNU g77 Killing Fortran?

Posted by Cliff on from the it's-just-a-flesh-wound-look-at-FreeBSD dept.

goombah99 asks: "I've come to believe that the existence of GNU g77 (and f2c) is holding back Fortran development. You might think that a free-ware compiler would be good for promoting the language. But it's not because the GNU flavor does not implement the de-facto standard DEC extensions to the language that give it dynamic memory allocation, pointers, and data structures. Without these Fortran 77 is indeed barbaric, but with them it is quite pleasant to work with. The problem is everyone writing new code is now afraid to use these commands in because of the desire to have their applications compilable by the teeming masses who may not want to pay $500 to $1000 dollars for a professional Fortran compiler (all of which do implement the DEC extension). F95 is being held back by the same considerations. Do you agree? Does anyone have some library extensions or pre-compilers that provide these capabilities to g77?" Are the DEC extensions so widespread and common that language survival is dependent on their inclusion, as the submitter suggests, in "every professional compiler". Assuming there aren't comparable features already available in g77, are there plans on eventually implementing similar?

4 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Old age. by t · · Score: 2, Funny
    Seriously, that is what is really killing fortran. When I was in undergrad about ten years ago they had stopped teaching fortran and had switched to C. Since then everyone falls into a couple of categories. (1) Those who learned fortran first and still use it. (2) Those who learned C first and thus have no reason to ever use Fortran. (3) Those who are forced by their jobs to use Fortran.

    Of these, group (1) is all the old foggies who are retiring, leaving group (2) people to continue the work. Typically what is done is C wrappers are made to call the legacy fortran code and all subsequent work is done in C. Group (3) people are always desperately trying to migrate their projects to C.

    That is why fortran is dieing.

  2. Re:Wrong... by Dancin_Santa · · Score: 2, Funny

    I made the switch after that Physics course that required Fortran. I haven't used Fortran since, and I haven't looked back.

    I learned Emacs in that course as well. I haven't used that since, either.

  3. Re:Fortran to C++ converter? by trouser · · Score: 2, Funny

    and into Bjarne's.

    --
    Now wash your hands.
  4. Re:10 GOTO 20 by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 1, Funny
    Its called lisp

    OK, let me rephrase the question. Couldn't you design an language with features specifically designed to enable this type of in-line compile-time code expansion, and have it not turn out as a functional language with retarded syntax?

    --
    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}