David Mathog writes:
>Odd that in industry HP seems to be the most common Unix platform, but they
>are rare in academia. GCG doesn't even support it, either not enough
>demand, or maybe some major incompatibility with the GCG software?
There is indeed a major incompatibility. HP Fortran behaves quite
differently to *all* the GCG-supported Unix Fortrans. To port EGCG
programs to HP (the German Cancer Research Centre support HP versions
somewhere) I would have to add "//Char(0)" to every character string
constant in every program. It's still standard Fortran of course, but
I would much rather forget about HP.
Even AIX was easier than this. The worst one in AIX was changing '???'
to '?'//'?'//'?' because the preprocessor wants to treat ??? as a
triptych. Oops, I forgot. Also I had to convert TAB-delimited Fortran
continuation lines to spaces because AIX, alone of the GCG-supported
systems, tabs to a different column.
All these are Fortran problems of course. I fully agree that plain
ANSI C is not too difficult to support across platforms, at least when
converting Unix to VMS. The other way round is often trickier.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Rice | Informatics Division,
E-mail: pmr at sanger.ac.uk | The Sanger Centre,
Tel: (44) 1223 494967 | Wellcome Trust Genome Campus,
Fax: (44) 1223 494919 | Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA,
URL: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/~pmr/ | England
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Rice | Informatics Division,
E-mail: pmr at sanger.ac.uk | The Sanger Centre,
Tel: (44) 1223 494967 | Wellcome Trust Genome Campus,
Fax: (44) 1223 494919 | Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA,
URL: http://www.sanger.ac.uk/~pmr/ | England
