Any decent Fortrans under Unix ? Which machine ?

[Mike Gigante]

We have a number of locally built 68k unix(v7 + BSD enhancements) machines here.
The fortran supplied with the machine (f77) is woefully inadequate. After
deciding we needed an alternate compiler to f77, we obtained the SVS product.
(silicon valley software). We have found this to be a *marked* improvement
to our version of f77. The compilation time, execution time and the memory
usage of the SVS compiler are substantially better than f77. Figures for
a matrix manipulation program are given below.

The minus for SVS fortran is that it has a very primitive debugger (compared
to say sdb & dbx). It adheres to the Fortran 77 standard very closely, 
enforcing clauses that are not usually enforced (e.g. no mixing of character
data with other types in named common). This often means a little more
effort is required in program conversion; not all fortran programmers are
strict in there usage of standard fortran :-) .

Program 1. The program 'display' from BYU-MOVIE.

(Only compile time is compared since there are a few problems with the 
compiler that caused a bum executable.)

	SVS		f77

	19.5 minutes	66.5 minutes   /* no optimization under f77 */

Program 2. Forsythe, Malcom & Moler 's 'decomp' & 'solve' for random
	   matrix of order 50.

a) double precision
	SVS		f77		f77 -O	

compile 34 sec  	131 sec 	164 sec
run	41 sec  	100 sec 	98 sec

b) single precision
	SVS		f77		f77 -O

compile 30 sec		129 sec		156 sec
run	21 sec		99 sec		97 sec

in comparison, on a vax 750 under 4.2BSD, 

compile			48 sec		127 sec
run (single)		 8 sec		  5.5 sec
    (double)		10 sec		  8 sec

I may not be talking about the most commonly available machines
but this is still software (the f77 compiler) that was *sold*
commercially as part of a standalone supermicro!!

I'm not sure which machines SVS is available for, nor their address
(off the top of my head). For 68k machines, I can recommend it highly.

Mike Gigante
Royal Melbourne Institute Of Techology
Melbourne, Australia.