Should g77 accept file extensions .f90 and .f95 ?

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot indiv dot nluug dot nl>]

A few days ago, Charlie Zender wrote on gcc-bugs@gcc.gnu.org:

> It is often useful to preprocess fortran code with a C-preprocessor.
> It would be really great if the preprocessor component of GCC were
> modified to treat *.F90 (Fortran 90) files exactly as it treats *.F 
> files.

And I replied:

> I'll look into this this weekend.  I'll probably extend this
> behaviour to .F95 files.

However, now that I *do* look into it, I see that g77 doesn't accept
.f90 and .f95 extensions *at all*.

So a couple of questions come up:

1. *Should* g77 support compiling Fortran source code in files with
   the extensions .f90 and .f95 (in the end, Fortran 77 is a subset
   of Fortran 90/95, so it is not unreasonable to have code that's
   compileable by g77 in files that end in .f90 or .f95).

2. If so, should this code be assumed to be free format (i.e. the
   compile time option -ffree-form be passed to the compiler by
   default) ?  I've checked that it is possible to override it by
   entering -fno-free-form.

3. Or should g77 refrain from even purporting it has anything to do
   with Fortran 90/95 and simply refuse to recognise extensions
   .f90 and .f95 given that GNU Fortran 95 is well under way ?

Please share your thoughts on this matter.

-- 
Toon Moene - mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phoneto: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
GNU Fortran 77: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77_news.html
GNU Fortran 95: http://g95.sourceforge.net/ (under construction)