Re: Praise for Gfortran (finally)

On Tue, 23 Sep 2008, Tobias Burnus wrote:

|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"[..] |
| |
|Tobias |
| |
|PS: I know someone who co-developes a larger Fortran program and he |
|complained that Fortran compilers are buggy: With C errors are almost |
|certainly user errors, but for Fortran one can never rule out compiler |
|bugs; the program thus now contains a couple of workarounds.I have to |
|agree: It is not too difficult to hit a compiler error now and then - |
|and I have already found several bugs in NAG f95, ifort, g95, |
|gfortran, sunf95, ... For gfortran, one can have the hope that its |
|wide-spread use will help to make it harder and harder to encounter |
|compiler bugs; fortunately, most of the reported bugs are old bugs or |
|bugs in new features and not regressions, e.g. things which used to |
|work with older gfortran versions." |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Tobias,

Thank you for contradicting Steven Bosscher's claim in
news:5b3f0a83-bc01-429b-991a-d42a44ed42c7@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
that people who have not studied the principles of compilers develop a
good compiler:
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|
|"On Sep 18, 4:13 pm, Arjen Markus <arjen.mar...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: |
|> Perhaps you can describe in some detail how people can help out: |
|> developing a compiler seems a rather daunting task and if you |
|> can tell about the less daunting aspects and tasks you may get more |
|> people involved. |
| |
|Well, daunting, daunting... Compiler construction as a (black) art is|
|overrated ;-) |
| |
|You have to realize that not a single one of the gfortran developers |
|(current and past, including g95) have a computer science background. |
|At least, not as far as I know. |
| |
|All gfortran developers are physicists, engineers, mathematicians, |
|etc., in their Real Life, just like most people that follow this |
|newsgroup. These developers started as Fortran users, with no more |
|knowledge of compiler construction than most people here. |
| |
|If they can learn to develop a compiler, then, certainly, you can do |
|it too! All it takes is a willing brain and an itch to scratch, such |
|as some bug that prevents you from compiling your program with |
|gfortran. |
| |
|To illustrate this, let me give an example: One of the most productive|
|developers of this moment was a Google Summer of Code student with |
|little (if any) knowledge about gcc/gfortran internals and development|
|processes. He only needed a couple of months to become a quite |
|proficient gfortran developer. |
| |
|Tobias already said the rest... |
| |
|Gr. |
|Steven" |
|----------------------------------------------------------------------|

Fortran exists because of one man. His formalism of language syntax
is virtually essential for studying languages and is used even in many
general purpose textbooks (even for describing Verilog and VHDL to
undergraduates of electronic engineering) instead of merely in books
on how to write compilers, but I have never seen it in a Fortran book.

Writing compilers without reading about established techniques on how
to do so is not effective. I am aware of someone who had graduated in
computer science who has tried to write a compiler without consulting
the literature, and he did not do well.

The aforementioned hero of language formalism and Fortran said that
FORTRAN I was good for the beginning of high-level programming but
that it should not be kept as a basis for better languages. Please
read hardcopy Pages 42 and 43 (PDF Pages 18 and 19) of
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=800025.1198345&coll=Portal&dl=GUIDE&CFID=3908514&CFTOKEN=33193345
..

Yours sincerely,
Colin Paul Gloster
.

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