Any decent Fortrans under Unix ? Which machine ?

[Mike Gigante]

> 
> I agree with most of Mike's responses (its a wonder no-one else has
> submitted such an article yet), but the last point re: f77 forces you
> to split your prog into small files     - is true, but this is not a
> BAD idea!
> 
> The whole concept of compilation under UNIX has been to allow the Make
> utility to maintain large programs by arranging for minimal
> recompilation.

Actually, some times it isn't worth it. For movie (v5.2), there are
hundreds of subroutines. After fsplit'ing and creating a makefile, I 
have found that up to 5 min cpu time (on 68k's) can be spent by make
checking update times of file. There is a lot of disk traffic associated
with this. It would be nicer to break the source into fewer,logically grouped
subroutines/functions as we *ALL* do with C source files. Unfortunately,
we can't do this with f77 as we either run out of memory or page the
system to death (dep. on which sys). Some programs also have VERY large
subroutines (someone else's code *of course*). Sometimes these can't be 
compiled under f77!!

Mike Gigante, Mechanical & Production Eng.
RMIT, Australia