Warning: Sun f77 1.4 beta clashes with yacc generated C code

[Alex Martelli]

esri!atlas!simon at uunet.uu.net (Simon Pigot) writes:
:Severe problems occur when using fortran 1.4 beta with C code generated
:using yacc. It seems that fortran 1.4 beta uses a yacc parser to parse
:fortran format specifications. Unfortunately the symbols used by their
:yacc parser conflict with those of any local yacc parsers called - the
:result is total confusion during formatted i/o including spurious error

Yes, I have met the same bug in the production release of 1.3 (by linking
with Ingres, which *also* had the same egregious oversight!).  Sun support
quickly reproduced and acknowledged the bug, and I had a patch tape in
hand in a few days.  As a temporary workaround, in the meantime, I had
used a copy of the library, patched with Perl (...do NOT trust any normal
text-oriented tool, such as sed, to patch a binary file... but Perl's
fine).

I share your hope that Sun realizes the true severity of this minor bug...
true, the usual case of user-written yacc code can be worked around easily
enough, but patching vendor-supplied binaries is not to everybody's
taste... besides the waste of time and energy in finding out what's
happening in the first place!

Alex Martelli - CAD.LAB s.p.a., v. Stalingrado 53, Bologna, Italia
Email: (work:) martelli at cadlab.sublink.org, (home:) alex at am.sublink.org
Phone: (work:) ++39 (51) 371099, (home:) ++39 (51) 250434; 
Fax: ++39 (51) 366964 (work only), Fidonet: 332/401.3 (home only).