Umm....g77 never fully supported VAX/VMS vintage Fortran.   We have a crap ton of old VMS code which used structures and records which never were supported by g77 to my knowledge.


And our experience with gfortran has actually been pretty favourable as it manages to digest some pretty awful fortran constructs which our in-house fortran preprocessor (called Force) produces.

Tony

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Konstantin Olchanski
Sent: December-16-15 11:37 AM
To: Stephan Wiesand
Cc: Ian A Taylor; Scientific Linux Users
Subject: g77 story, Re: g2c library

On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 08:13:44PM +0100, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
> 
> With the advent of gcc4 ("~ since the dawn of time"), g77 was replaced with gfortran and libg2c with libgfortran.
> 

Must keep the story straight.

g77 is a proper Fortran compiler that implements Fortran-4, Fortran-77, IBM and VAX extension, etc.

After the g77 author and maintainer retired, g77 was eventually deleted from gcc. (as if nobody uses it anymore, go gcc, go!).

Meanwhile some young yahoos who have only seen a VAX on wikipedia wrote a completely new compiler to the Fortran-90 specifications, now included in gcc as "gfortran".

As all of you surely know, Fortran-90 has nothing to do with traditional Fortran and this gfortran newthing cannot compile most of the fortran code we still use daily. (nor does it compile the Fortran-90 code we have in one of our defunct experiments - that code was written using Absoft and Intel f90 - unlike gfortran, Absoft and Intel got it right - by including compatibility modes for traditional fortran).

This is a sorry mess, same as if they deleted the gcc "c" compiler and told everybody to use "g++" as replacement, except that Fortran-90 comes without the clause about "incompatibilities between C and C++ should be reduced as much as possible" - quoting Bjarne Stroustrup at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibility_of_C_and_C%2B%2B
(again, Bell Labs got it right, unnamed GCC yahoos got it wrong).

--
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada