Re: Free source form with Fortran 77 compilers

Terence wrote:

On Jun 9, 2:36 am, nos...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Richard Maine) wrote:

Steve Lionel <steve.lio...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Maine wrote:

A free form of some sort or other was done quite a lot in later f77
compilers. For example VAX Fortran had one. That alone accounts for a
nontrivial fraction of f77.

As a former developer on VAX Fortran, I would disagree with this. What
you may be thinking of is what DEC called "tab source form", which was a
slight variation on fixed-form that used a tab to separate the label
field from the statement field, with continuation depending on whether a
non-zero digit followed the tab. Other than that, it followed
fixed-form source rules including ignoring blanks and a 72-column limit.

Yes, that's what I was referring to. I know it wasn't the f90 variant. I
think of it as simillar in that you didn't have to count columns (except
for the col 72 limit, but then that is less often an issue that col 7,
and even f90 has such a limit - its just larger).

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain


Richard surprised me.
Since I worked for Shell on process control projects, we had quite a
few Vax machines off and on. And I had never seen a true free-form
Fortran F77 on that machine.

Since we used to write our Fortran-based models in freeform source, it turned out to be a competitive advantage for us when a customer forced us to release it to a competitor. The competitor had a horrible time converting it to work on a VAX :) It also took 4 VAXen to replicate our performance on a single H-series (plus proprietary parallel peripheral processors).


Tabs yes.
And there was an HP minicomputer I used Fortran on in '69/70 or
thereabouts.
That wasn't free-form either. And later the Modcomp series and IBM
1130s....


--

Gary Scott
mailto:garylscott@sbcglobal dot net

Fortran Library: http://www.fortranlib.com

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