GFortran docs: a draft of "Project Status" updates.

[Brooks Moses <bmoses at stanford dot edu>]

As promised some months ago, I've been working on a thorough rewrite of 
the "Project Status" section (chapter 5) of the GNU Fortran manual.  I'm 
waiting on Steve to commit my current patches to gfortran.texi before I 
submit this one (the problem with making lots of changes to a single 
file is that all the patches overlap, unless I submit a monster patch 
that does a dozen different things and hides all the controversial stuff 
in a sea of typo fixes!), but in the interim, here's a rough draft of 
the reworded text.

I'd very much appreciate comments on this.  In particular, does it 
convey accurate information?  Does it leave anything important out?  Are 
there things that could be said better?

This replaces the existing sections 5.1 and 5.2 (Compiler Status and 
Library Status), along with the paragraph immediately prior to section 
5.1 about how "The GNU Fortran compiler is currently reaching the stage 
where is is able to compile real world programs":

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5.1 Compiler and Library Status

The GNU Fortran compiler is able to compile nearly all 
standard-compliant Fortran 95, Fortran 90, and Fortran 77 programs, 
including a number of standard and non-standard extensions, and can be 
used on real-world programs. In particular, the supported extensions
include OpenMP, Cray-style pointers, and several Fortran 2003 features 
such as enumeration, stream I/O, and some of the enhancements to 
allocatable array support from TR 15581. However, it is still under 
development and has a few remaining rough edges.

At present, the GNU Fortran compiler passes the NIST Fortran 77 Test 
Suite, and nearly passes the LAPACK Test Suite. It also provides 
respectable performance on the Polyhedron Fortran compiler benchmarks 
and the Livermore Fortran Kernels test. It has been used to compile a 
number of large real-world programs, including the HIRLAM 
weather-forecasting code and the Tonto quantum chemistry package.

Among other things, the GNU Fortran compiler is intended as a 
replacement for G77. At this point, nearly all programs that could be 
compiled with G77 can be compiled with GNU Fortran, although there are a 
few minor known regressions.

The primary work remaining to be done on GNU Fortran falls into three 
categories: bug fixing (primarily regarding the treatment of invalid 
code and providing useful error messages), improving the compiler 
optimizations and the performance of compiled code, and extending the 
compiler to support future standards – in particular, Fortran 2003.
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Thanks!
- Brooks