Is GNU g77 Killing Fortran?

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?

Comments

what is killing fortran

[Mark Muller]

What is really killing fortran is the perception that fortran == f77. Tell someone you program
in fortran, and they immediately think of old,ugly f77.

I write code (both reasearch and commercial vibration analysis) in fortran90/95 every day - I
use modules, I use pointers, and I get great performance. A few things I also get:

1) clean, neat code that is easy to read by non-programmers.

2) Array bounds checking by the compiler - try that with C++. Array bounds checking saves me
huge amounts of time in development.

3) Compiler checking of function calls, via encapsulation of functions in modules.

4) Easy use of BLAS and LAPACK routines for real computational work.

5) The actual function definition used for the function prototype - I don't have to maintain a
separate prototype for my functions to get the advantages of prototyping!

Fortran isn't perfect (yet). It still lacks the ability to make a function part of a data
structure (ie, classes). It current i/o abilities still suck. It's ability to handle characters and
character strings is terrible. But it does have advantages other than producing fast code, and it
isn't your father's fortran77.