[Discuss] FORTRAN -> ???

[feenberg at nber.org (Daniel Feenberg)]

On Sun, 22 Jan 2012, Richard Pieri wrote:

> On Jan 22, 2012, at 2:02 PM, Daniel C. wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone know of an automated tool to do this?  I checked Google
>> and a few things came up but nothing that looked particularly helpful.
>
> There are several FORTRAN to C source converters out there.
> f2c is one of the best, and it's open source.

f2c is really good, but the C code will look mechanically generated, and 
not be so easy to maintain itself. For a while we used it to run a 30,000 
line F77 program on a computer with no F77 compiler, and did not have to 
change a single line. But I never tried to edit the C code.

FORTRAN is a very simple language. A C programmer could learn enough to 
maintain a FORTRAN 77 program in a morning, assuming that maintainance 
doesn't mean "write a GUI interface" or "refactor to run multiple 
threads", but consists of things closer to "change the maximum string 
length from 12 to 18".

Daniel Feenberg

>
> --Rich P.
>
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