[Bug fortran/35916] problem running gfortran 4.4.0 in Vista

[Jerry DeLisle]

DHConsultancy at skynet dot be wrote:
> Nevertheless, may I make a few suggestions?
>
> - please keep the installers for the previous stable versions available, 
> so that it is possible to regress to a version that worked; on the Wiki 
> pages, only the last version is available, and that usually is an 
> experimental one. Maybe I missed something and older versions are still 
> available somewhere, but then this is not obvious.
>   
I have Vista available now, so when I get time I will try to get a build 
going for it.

It is really hard to understand why the Vista vendor would change 
something so fundamental as a command shell argv behavior.  Oh well.
> - Much to my regret and undoubtedly to many others as well, Vista is 
> here to stay; I didn't even have the option to install XP on my new 
> laptop, and XP distribution will cease more or less soon anyway.
> So I would strongly suggest to perform the same severe testing for Vista 
> as you undoubtedly do for XP
>   
OT The first thing I did when I got my new computer with Vista 
pre-installed was install a Linux distribution and be done with that 
issue.  Vista may be here to stay, but ultimately, people have choices 
and they could choose differently.  The unfortunate thing is the 
blindness within most IT departments staff who have been "programmed" to 
stay within a certain sandbox.
> I am trying to convince my international colleagues to switch from g77 
> to gfortran. Many of them still use g77, even though it is no longer 
> supported or even officially distributed (you wouldn't believe what some 
> of them do to install g77!).
> However, some large Fortran libraries which were built a decade or so 
> ago for g77, are still very much in use, with very little chance of them 
> ever being updated. I have tried to build one of these from source, with 
> the provided make files, using gfortran, but gave up very quickly after 
> being inundated with errors and warnings.
>   
Regarding g77 and gfortran compatibility.  We would really like to see 
examples of code that is causing the issues. Warnings can be turned off 
with -w.  There are several legacy features in gfortran that can be 
turned on with -std=legacy or other compiler switches to assist with non 
standard code.
> In my experience, one of the main differences is the definition of 
> structures, and the structure syntax (e.g. the use of "%" instead of 
> "."). Is there a way (compiler option or something) to compile old code 
> with old structure definitions, using gfortran, and without replacing 
> them in the source code?
I am not familiar with this structure issue you are discussing.  C uses
the '.' and Fortran uses the '%'.  Is this what you are talking about? 
It sounded like you were referring to structures in g77.

Jerry