How Broken is Sun Fortran (Summary)

[John Prentice]

In article <1991Feb8.023527.20806 at fs7.ece.cmu.edu> winstead at faraday.ECE.CMU.EDU (Charles Holden Winstead) writes:
>
>   1- Is Fortran on these Suns different than 'conventional' Fortran? i.e.
>      what do I have to look out for?
>

We have ported a large number of codes from PC's and Cray's to Sun Fortran.
I have not found anything in Sun Fortran that has caused problems.  It seems
to include everything in the Fortran 77 standard.  There are additions as
well, specific to Sun.  They only one we are making significant use of
are the Fortran pointers (which work identically to how Cray uses them,
something that came as a pleasant surprise to us).  We use they in
conjunction with calls to malloc (which Sun Fortran provides a nice
Fortran interface to, saving you the trouble) to perform dynamic
dimensioning.  We use this feature extensively and have never had any
problems.  In general, I am fairly impressed by Sun Fortran.  Our only
complaint has been some bugs in 1.3.1 which have caused us problems,
particularly of late.  However, to be fair, we have used this compiler
ALOT and only recently have we run into major problems.  I am assured
that these problems have been fixed in the new release, so that should
not be regarded as a major stumbling block.

John

--
John K. Prentice    john at unmfys.unm.edu (Internet)
Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
Computational Physics Group, Amparo Corporation, Albuquerque, NM, USA