Any decent Fortrans under Unix ? Which machine ?

[Peter S. Shenkin]

In article <bu-cs.210> bzs at bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:
>
>Guy Harris makes some very good points, I would like to add a few, I
>have dealt with this issue and folklore here, my response has become
>very simple:
>
>Those here that went with a vendor's proprietary systems because they
>believed the fortran to be better remain on those systems to this day.

	This scarcely seems like an argument against those systems.  Maybe they
	stayed on them because they like them!

>Those that went with UNIX (and a few that were willing to change over
>having realized their mistake) have doubled and trebled (and, in one
>case 12x) their performance by replacing their hardware with newer
>hardware that is coming out mostly running UNIX.

	Depending on the hardware and the software, you have to ask whether
	their improvement might have been even greater had they run something
	other than UNIX on their new hardware.  Also, to double or treble
	performance starting with something whose performance is egregious
	is no great trick.

>Two groups have specifically said that they have not taken advantage of
>this because their fortran code has become too heavily dependant on the
>vendor's proprietary hardware/software environment and they do not have
>the personnel resources to switch over.
>
>Don't make the same mistake...

	That mistake cuts both ways.  f77 also has quirks unique to it which
	make porting to other machines difficult.  Fact:  it's hard to write
	portable code.  And at least one of the new and laudable advents in
	the UNIX Fortran world, the availability of DEC's native compiler under
	ULTRIX, will perpetuate (if that's what I mean) the problem (if it's
	a problem);  this Fortran has all the VMS-Fortran extensions (DO...
	ENDDO, etc.), which are different from the f77 extensions ("strings
	with double quotes like these", recursion, various argument 
	passing and output formatting quirks).  Some worlds, such as the
	molecular modeling world, are built around DEC Fortran.  Since most
	programs to do this kind of thing are in the range of 20-60K lines of
	source code, and are freely proliferated, in such worlds DEC Fortran
	(whose extensions I understand actually emanate from an old military
	spec!) has become the de facto standard.  In fact, at least some
	microsupercomputers running UNIX have vectorized Fortran compilers to be
 	compatible with source written for VMS Fortran.  As more good Fortrans
 	become available under UNIX, these features, and dependence on them, 
	will proliferate, willy-nilly.

	SUMMARY:  Now, at last, there are UNIX systems on which good Fortran
	compilers are available.  This is wonderful, and right now we're
	entering an era in which you don't have to eschew UNIX for lack of
	a good Fortran.  But let's remember that this has happened *only*
	within the past year, at the most, that the "classical" UNIX
	user still thinks of Fortran the way Lorenzo thought of the Dark Ages,
	and that the performance and reliability of -- let me play it safe -- 
	*almost* all Fortrans under *almost* all flavors of UNIX on *almost* 
	all machines has been depressing to contemplate through *almost* all
	of the history of UNIX.

	Peter S. Shenkin	 Columbia Univ. Biology Dept., NY, NY  10027
	{philabs,rna}!cubsvax!peters		cubsvax!peters at columbia.ARPA