Re: gfortran

[Brooks Moses <bmoses at stanford dot edu>]

On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 02:51:33PM +0000, Eef van Beveren wrote:
>  Fedora 6 has been installed on my computer
> and with it gFortran. It is shocking to find
> all my routines, build for g77, no longer
> running. I tried to repair some. But, I found
> that it is a hopeless task. There are even
> inconsistencies with regard to backslash
> (used to be always 2 backslashes when 1 is
> needed, but now it seems to depend on how it
> called. Hence, sometimes 1 sometimes 2 and
> God knows when 1 and when 2!). Thousands of
> lines of Fortran routines nust again be
> debugged. Beyond possibility, I do not have
> time for compiler builders who are joking with
> me. Please make g77 again available!!!!!
>  Regards, Eef van Beveren

As mentioned elsewhere, Fedora has compatibility packages which offer
g77.  We have not stopped making g77 available; GCC 3.4.6 -- which
contains it -- can still be downloaded from the gcc website.

What we have not done is the very substantial amount of work required to
update and rewrite g77 to work with GCC 4.0 and later.  The common parts
of the compiler changed significantly, and it would have taken a
substantial amount of effort to rewrite g77 to work with them.  There
simply aren't enough volunteers with any interest in doing this.

Thus, the decision was made to instead make the new Fortran compiler,
gfortran, into an (almost) completely compatible replacement for g77.  
Even with all of the effort from all the Fortran volunteers going into
this task, the compiler was not complete for version 4.0, and is still
quite buggy in version 4.1.  Version 4.2, which should be released
within a month, is significantly better; nearly all of the regressions
from g77 -- and, yes, we do consider differences between the two to be
bugs, and give them the priority of any other compiler regression --
except some fairly small ones should be fixed.

Unfortunately, it will take some time for the updated version to get
into Linux distributions; it's certainly not there now.  You're probably
working with the quite buggy 4.1 version, but it's possible that what
you have is the 4.0 version which is even worse.

My recommendation would be for you to install a pre-release copy of
GCC 4.2 (see the main http://gcc.gnu.org website for a link), and try
that, and see if that fixes your problems.  If it doesn't, feel free to
file bug reports about the differences; there are also links to the
bug-reporting page from the main gcc.gnu.org page.

Thanks,
- Brooks