I recently received a very generous gift — a Mac Mini &mdash
expressing gratitude for my work on g77,
from Glen Clark, a longtime user and fan of, as well as
contributor to, g77.
The arrival of the Mini was perfectly timed to coincide with this holiday week. I (well, my wife, while out doing an errand) acquired a 20" Samsung SyncMaster monitor to connect to its DVI interface, as I already had a Kinesis keyboard (with an USB adaptor) and a USB trackball available for use with it.
Substantially as a result of deploying this Mini as an additional, and very valuable, in-house fileserver, a logjam of sorts has burst, allowing me to tend to a number of tasks pertaining to our in-house LAN and my consulting work, including installing Fedora Core 6 on an old used laptop I acquired to someday (soon, now?) replace my old Pentium II workstation as our router/firewall and Internet-facing email, web, and FTP server.
(The Mini, along with the 20" display, inspired me to publish some of my best and favorite pictures of snow-covered trees for distribution and use as screensavers on personal computers.)
More than the Mini itself, I appreciate Glen's relating of
how he continues to use software compiled by g77 in
his consulting business ("Glen Clark & Associates, Broadcast
Consultants, New Castle, PA 16105").
Especially since g77 has long since been replaced,
in the GCC distribution, with
gfortran,
a more modern and featureful compiler,
it's nice to know g77 had a reasonably long shelf
life, in addition to being used fairly widely during its heyday!
Updated goodies page with list of people for whom I still have undelivered certificates of appreciation.
Got an email from Glen Clark
and confirmed his identity
as a past contributor to g77.
(Glen will receive a
"gratitude package"
from me soon!)
Possibly of historic interest to a few readers,
I'm
selling my 1983 Chevy Camaro,
which I drove back and forth to the Free Software Foundation (FSF)
and Cygnus offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
back when I was first integrating
the g77 front end with the GCC
optimizer and code generator.
If the buyer of this car mentions GNU Fortran, he gets two free "GNU Fortran: It's free crunch time" T-shirts, mugs, and notepads!
(I will be amazed if even any potential buyer mentions GNU Fortran, but you never know...!)
Got an email from Bruce Wayne Patton
and confirmed his identity
as a past contributor to g77,
so I'm now searching for only
Glen Clark.
(Bruce will receive a
"gratitude package"
from me after I get his T-shirt size, etc.)
Changed title to clarify that these pages
pertain primarily to g77;
they don't "speak" for other GNU Fortran developers
(such as the developers of
the G95 project).
Fixed "wordo" in "More on Who Uses GNU Fortran?" thanks to an alert reader.
Updated links to reflect new location of The G95 Project.
I'm trying to find a past contributor named Bruce Wayne Patton (as well as another named Glen Clark).
I owe them goodies (a newly-added page) for having contributed in the past.
If you recognize those names as belonging to numerical-analysis, Fortran-using people from recent encounters with them, please put them in touch with me!
Updated my reasons for moving on and my recommendations for g77 to bring them up to date.
Various other updates and edits throughout this page and its subpages.
A reader wrote to suggest changes needed to the "More on Who Uses GNU Fortran?" page, such as clarifying an email mentioning the "cap compiler".
Work has begun (by Andy Vaught, not me!) on The G95 Project, a free Fortran 95 compiler. I particularly appreciated the use of the "It's free crunch time" motto on the home page!
Hope they get this integrated into GCC soon, so they can take advantage of the garbage-collecting memory-management added last year. That alone would eliminate lots of hassle and bugs! (But I probably shouldn't start making suggestions about the direction of the project. ;-)
Still no new g77 announcements of significance on the pertinent mailing lists, though I gather there are some behind-the-scenes discussions going on vis-a-vis some offers of help I've seen on them.
At least I haven't gotten any hysterical email or phone calls complaining about Y2K bugs in g77!
I've received a couple of donations the past few weeks, though one might be intended for the FSF since that's who it's made out to. (I'm going to send it back with a note explaining why.) The other one was clearly intended as a "thank-you" for past work, a very nice touch, especially coming from someone who has long supported g77 in other ways! (That individual wished to remain anonymous.)
I'll be away (from the Internet, anyway!) on vacation from 1999-11-05 through 11-13.
Someone recently asked the
older stand-alone g77 mailing list
(fortran at-sign gnu.org)
about the status of finding new developers for g77.
I suggest people watch for announcements coming from the
GCC Steering Committee
on the
web site
or by subscribing to the
mailing list for announcements
(gcc-announce-subscribe at-sign gcc.gnu.org).
Once I find about something worth publicizing, I'll announce it here, of course. But I might find it out only via those avenues as well, since I'm subscribed to little more than the mailing list for GCC announcements these days.
People interested in late-breaking info should therefore probably not rely on this (my) web site exclusively!
Added new section called How Will GNU Fortran Progress? to better cope with people coming from the GCC page's 1999-10-16 news entry regarding g77.
Although I've decided to no longer voluntarily do new work on g77, I've been doing some wrap-up work to ease the transition to new project leadership, developers, and maintainers.
Updated various chunks of text on this page, renaming EGCS to GCC, switching to the new official web site for that project, and so on.
Updated my reasons for moving on to incorporate some feedback from its readers to date.
Updated my recommendations for g77.
Now available are my recommendations for g77 for the GCC Steering Committee, as well as any other interested parties, to consider.
I've updated my reasons for moving on, fixing formatting and such.
I've updated my reasons for moving on.
I've made my reasons for moving on available for anyone interested.
New release info available.
Restored the proper <BASE> tag in this file,
so some browsers can pull up sub-pages.
I've received, and am slowly getting used to, my new computer keyboard (which is the main reason why I've been so "quiet" lately).
Work on a fuller explanation of why I've decided to stop working on g77 beyond supporting the 2.95 release, as well as recommendations for what steps g77 users and the GCC development team should take next, has taken a back seat to getting used to the new keyboard, among other things. I hope to finish that material and put it up at this site soon.
I've added a <BASE> tag to this page,
which might help some people browse its sub-pages.
(Though nobody's complained about this particular page,
I have gotten complaints when the tag was missing from my home page.)
I think I've found my next computer keyboard! Haven't ordered it yet.
I've decided to stop working on g77,
except perhaps as a very-part-time volunteer working on GCC,
beyond the 2.95 version of GCC
(g77 version 0.5.25).
Toon Moene
(<toon at-sign moene.indiv.nluug.nl>)
has written a
report
on the goings-on at the
the GNU Fortran (g77) Birds-Of-a-Feather (BOF) session
on 1999-05-22, which he organized and ran.
I attended LinuxExpo 1999-05-18 through 1999-05-22. Read my impressions of it!
C ----------------------------------------------------------------------- C ----- GNU Fortran (g77) ----- C ----------------------------------------------------------------------- C PROGRAM G77 C COMMON/QUICKY/QNEWS,QWHAT,QWHO,QHOW,QWHERE,QRLEAS,QSTAT,QWANT, 1 QY2K,QALIGN,QFUND,QF2C,QMAIL C REAL BOF C WHAT() = 2. * 3.14 * QWHAT C READ *,STATUS,NEXT CALL GIMME(FUNDS,*999) PRINT *,'Goodies For Contributors!!' GO TO (999),NEXT CONTINUE INQUIRE (UNIT=99,NAME=WANTED) CALL WHO(CRUNCH) 999 STOP 3HWHY END C C ----------------------------------------------------------------------- C C Copyright (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2006 James Craig Burley C C Last modified 2007-07-16 C C -----------------------------------------------------------------------