Re: "Visual" Fortran?

From: Robert Baer (robertbaer_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 04/10/04 

Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2004 08:05:41 GMT

Andrew McLaren wrote:
>
> Robert Baer <robertbaer@earthlink.net> wrote in news:40766196.A595DEF2
> @earthlink.net:
>
> > Is there such a beastie as an inexpensive "visual" Fortran compiler
> > (for WinDoz)?
> > I am working on a routine that eventually will need to be "ported"
> > into WinDoz: need to be ablr to control screen resolution on the fly,
> > use a mouse, and have pop-up text read/write boxes.
>
> If you what a cheap/free FORTRAN compiler for Windows, it's pretty hard
> (IMHO) to beat the Watcom Compiler:
>
> http://www.openwatcom.org/
>
> This is reasonably compliant, reliable, mature and it produces Win32
> binaries.
>
> There are a few additonal considerations ...
>
> If you are doing "real" work and not just playing around (not that
> there's anything wrong with playing around) then your money will be well-
> spent by buying a commercial compiler.
>
> If you want to write User Interface modules for Windows, then using
> FORTRAN is likely to be a very poor choice.
>
> FORTRAN is a brillinat langauge; and what it does well, it does very well
> indeed, better than most other languages. But it was never intended to be
> good language for GUI work.
>
> Fortunately, Windows development does *not* oblige you to use the same
> language and tools for User Interface as for background or middle-tier
> services. If you're targeting an inhouse or small user base, you can use
> Visual Basic 6.0 to do teh GUI from end, and compile all your FORTRAN
> stuff into DLLs. You just load and call the DLLs from your VB front end.
>
> If you're targetting a mass-market user base and you want to use Win32,
> then your GUI front-end should probably be done using Visual C++.
>
> If you are targeting Windows .Net Platform, you can use VB.Net, C#, C++
> for .Net or whatever. Creating GUI front ends is much easier, more
> reliable and gives much better performance in .Net than teh older
> Win32/VB6.0 world. But the same principle applies: write your GUI in a
> language that provides a rich set of GUI facilities. Do your number-
> crunching in a langauge that does number-crunching well. Th ebeauty of
> the .Net platform is that combining modules written in many different
> langauges is very easy and very reliable. So do your number crunching in
> FORTRAN (eg Lahet FIRTRAN .Net), your front end GUI in VB.Net, and
> migrate across your Java code using C# or J#.
>
> If you need to taget multiple platorms (you said you'll *eventualy* move
> teh code to Windows) then you could also consider using one of the cross-
> platform GUI Builder tools. That way you can get an absolutley consistent
> GUI appearance on Unix, Windows, Linux and VMS (for example). But even
> there' you'd want to look at using an appropriate langauge for teh GUI
> stuff and leave the FORTRAN for the number-crinching. If you keep your
> FORTRAN focused like this it will end up being much, much easier to port
> across platforms.
>
> Hope it helps
> Andrew

  I have had the Watcom F77 compiler since version 10, and upgraded it
at every step; the latest is 11.0C (or the newer name OpenWatcom 1.0).
  And the only graphics that is supported is for DOS.
  I have multi-million digit math routines that work in all M$
platforms, up to the limit of RAM or 2Gbytes, whichever is the smaller.

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