Commit 4b4eb648 by Brooks Moses Committed by Brooks Moses

* gfortran.texi (GFortran and G77): Rewrite completely.

From-SVN: r122602
parent 090021e9
2007-03-05 Brooks Moses <brooks.moses@codesourcery.com>
* gfortran.texi (GFortran and G77): Rewrite completely.
2007-03-05 Brooks Moses <brooks.moses@codesourcery.com>
* match.c (gfc_match_name): Expanded comment.
2007-03-05 Brooks Moses <brooks.moses@codesourcery.com>
......
......@@ -389,36 +389,12 @@ Fortran compiler.
@cindex Fortran 77
@cindex G77
Why do we write a compiler front end from scratch?
There's a fine Fortran 77 compiler in the
GNU Compiler Collection that accepts some features
of the Fortran 90 standard as extensions.
Why not start from there and revamp it?
One of the reasons is that Craig Burley, the author of G77,
has decided to stop working on the G77 front end.
On @uref{http://world.std.com/~burley/g77-why.html,
Craig explains the reasons for his decision to stop working on G77}
in one of the pages in his homepage.
Among the reasons is a lack of interest in improvements to
@command{g77}.
Users appear to be quite satisfied with @command{g77} as it is.
While @command{g77} is still being maintained (by Toon Moene),
it is unlikely that sufficient people will be willing
to completely rewrite the existing code.
But there are other reasons to start from scratch.
Many people, including Craig Burley,
no longer agreed with certain design decisions in the G77 front end.
Also, the interface of @command{g77} to the back end is written in
a style which is confusing and not up to date on recommended practice.
In fact, a full rewrite had already been planned for GCC 3.0.
When Craig decided to stop,
it just seemed to be a better idea to start a new project from scratch,
because it was expected to be easier to maintain code we
develop ourselves than to do a major overhaul of @command{g77} first,
and then build a Fortran 95 compiler out of it.
The GNU Fortran compiler is the successor to G77, the Fortran 77 front
end included in GCC prior to version 4. It is an entirely new program
that has been designed to provide Fortran 95 support and extensibility
for future Fortran language standards, as well as providing backwards
compatibility for Fortran 77 and nearly all of the GNU language
extensions supported by G77.
@c ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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