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Legacy code: why throw it away?
Objective
Issue: 4.5 (May/June 2006)
Author Bio: Didier, aka dda, left Korea after 11 years working there, and is now exporting wine and spirits to Asia.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 10,135
Starting Page Number: 46
Article Number: 4518
Related Web Link(s):
http://www.netlib.org/f2c
http://fink.sf.net
http://www.fortran.com/
http://crd.lbl.gov/~dhbailey/
http://www.fortran.com/
Excerpt of article text...
This issue's column -- and probably the next one -- started as an email conversation between a reader (Franco Vaccari -- not to name him) and me. It rapidly developed to a point where I had enough material for an article that could interest more than one reader. So we broadened a bit the field of our discussion and this article is a snapshot of the ongoing effort we are making on providing a framework to re-compile Fortran code into C code and reuse it in RB. Franco's original requirement is to be able to reuse heaps of Fortran code they have developed at his institution, using f2c (
http://www.netlib.org/f2c ) to convert F77 code to C. With C source code, gcc and some Declares, and a bit of patience too, we should be able to recycle Gramps' code, right? Let's see how...
Objective This column will lay the ground work for an automated Fortran-to-C-to-RB build framework. The ultimate objective would be of course to use RB 2006's latest shiny feature, IDE scripting. But in the meantime, we'll do the following:
- provide for easy compilation of Fortran code into a C dylib
produce necessary declares for the RB application
provide install and packaging services for the final product
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