[18837] in s-news-athena
[S] Fortran Compilers- Responses to 7/29 Posting - Is Watcom disconti
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (BALCH, ALFRED H [PHR/1005])
Tue Aug 3 14:35:57 1999
Message-Id: <6108217C18D8D211AB8700A0C9EAEF0401336F34@ems1000-01.monsanto.com>
From: "BALCH, ALFRED H [PHR/1005]" <ALFRED.H.BALCH@stl.Monsanto.com>
To: s-news@wubios.wustl.edu
Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:31:42 -0500
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Thanks to all who responded:
Most of these responses were posted to the S-news site already, so I'll just
summarize:
1. Watcom FORTRAN is a useful tool especially if you want to link to
built-in FORTRAN functions.
2. It is possible to use dll.load instead of dyn.load in many cases, and in
this case another
compiler (everyone seemed to like Lahey's compiler the best) is a reasonable
solution.
3. The WATCOM compiler is not FORTRAN 95, but an earlier version with fewer
capabilities.
With regard to the last item I found, at the Sybase site, that version 11 of
Watcom's FORTRAN is FORTRAN 90. This is probably better than their FORTRAN77
version which is widely used, but may not have the full capability of
FORTRAN95 (?). Most of the additional
capabilities of FORTRAN appear to be with regard to the stand-alone
capability of the language (intrinsic arrays) and are not
related to the interface.
I am a little surprised not to have heard from MathSoft about this issue,
and I am still wondering what their future compiler will be
as new versions of S-PLUS for Windows95/NT are developed and released.
Meanwhile, WATCOM seems like the way to go for me, and I will add on the
additional compilers as needed.
Fred Balch
Alfred H. Balch
Searle Research & Development
St. Louis, Missouri, USA
alfred.h.balch@monsanto.com
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Abbreviated summary of responses:
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I think you don't really need Watcom Fortran. Any compiler that
is capable of generating dll's can be used with S-plus,
through the dll.load function. I have Digital Fortran 6.0
and it works fine.
hope this helps.
Fernando A. Quintana *
* Departamento de Probabilidad y Estadistica *
* Facultad de Matematica *
* Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile *
* Av. V. Mackenna 4860 *
* Santiago 690 44 11 *
* CHILE
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**********
The Microsoft Fortran compiler was discontinued years ago, so that would be
a poor choice. During its existence, I saw frequent complaints of its
bugginess and lack of conformance to the Fortran standard.
The Watcom compiler was a good one, but it was FORTRAN (77), an older
version of the language, and thus lacked most of the interesting features
of modern Fortran (95), the most notable in the context of S being
intrinsic array operations. I would not recommend that *anyone* purchase a
FORTRAN 77 compiler anymore.
Many fine, modern, Fortran (95)-standard-conforming compilers are available
for the PC, and most, if not all, will make DLL's. For a survey of them,
you could consult
http://www.polyhedron.com/
I use the Lahey compiler, which does not depend on a huge GUI IDE
(integrated development environment) and is available inexpensively.
www.lahey.com
The other compilers also have plenty of satisfied users, according to
recent postings on comp.lang.fortran.
Michael Prager <Mike.Prager@noaa.gov>
NOAA Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research
Beaufort, North Carolina 28516 USA
**********************************************************************
...
Michael - I stay away from DLLS because I need to call builtin-fortran
modules that S+ provides for matrix operations. I would appreciate
some info about compilers that produce .obj files that work with S+ as
well as Watcom. Thanks -Frank
...
Frank E Harrell Jr
Professor of Biostatistics and Statistics
Division of Biostatistics and Epidemiology
Department of Health Evaluation Sciences
University of Virginia School of Medicine
http://hesweb1.med.virginia.edu/biostat
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******
I am sure there are none that produce .obj files in Watcom format. Some
Fortran compilers can produce DLLs. One of the best available is the free
one, g77: see the V&R2 Programming Complements for how to use it. Another
perfectly viable option is to use f2c plus your favourite C compiler: this
does work with Visual C++.
You do need to be very careful with using DLLs that call inbuilt functions:
the calling conventions are not fully defined and Watcom and (e.g.) Visual
C++ do differ.
...
I have tried both using dyn.load and dll.load extensively, the latter with
about half a dozen different compilers. It is no accident that all the code
in my SWin collection used Watcom and dyn.load. If I could not buy
those (and I would to ease my job) I would use the egcs-1.1.2-mingw32
versions of gcc/g77. The latter work well (as their use for the Windows
version of the other S-like system shows.)
[Please don't ask me where to find all these bits: try an Internet search.]
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
Alfred H. Balch
Searle Research & Development
alfred.h.balch@monsanto.com
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