Re: Fortran Interface in Ada9X RM - Annex M.

Re: Fortran Interface in Ada9X RM - Annex M.

[Gregory Aharonian]

>If anyone out there knows of an Ada83 compiler company that's going after
>all those Fortran folks by implementing this functionality, please let
>me know, because I have a LOT of engineer colleagues who might respond
>favorably. Their present response about Ada is "Oh, that DoD toy.
>They're just a bunch of real-timers who don't give a damn about the
>engineering world. Let me know when they'll give me a finite-element
>system, or when I can hook up all that old Fortran code, or IMSL."

Given that until quite recently, more code was reused in Fortran by
scientists and engineers than any other language (now surpassed by
reuse of C and C++) code, there are tremendous amounts of Fortran
code heavily used around the world, code capability which they will
want to have  in any new language before they switch.  So Mike's
concerns are very valid.

    Unfortunately, given the crimes in coding you can commit with
Fortran (and I like the language), much of this is hard to interface
to with any pragma convention, especially when it comes to array
manipulation.  Fortran makes assumptions about array allocation that
are not overly compatible with Ada (or any other language).

   The best solution is to reengineer the Fortran code into Adatran,
having studied this problem in great length (since most of my government
source code database is in Fortran).  For example, consider one of the
classic, heavily reused DoD Fortran programs, LOWTRAN.  This would have
been a very influential code to convert to Ada as a start of converting
the hordes of DoD Fortran programmers to Ada.  And at 20,000 lines of
Fortran, 10,000 of which are mostly arrays of coefficients, it would not
require much funding to convert the thing to Ada, if anyone really cared
about the problem of DoD Fortran research vis-a-vis the Mandate.  But
they don't, it hasn't, and Mike's colleagues' excuses remain.

-- 
**************************************************************************
 Greg Aharonian
 Source Translation & Optimization
 P.O. Box 404, Belmont, MA 02178