Hello everybody --
 
In December I mentioned that MS Fortran for DOS was no longer being made and
asked people in the list about which Fortran compilers they were using with
DSSAT programs.  Last week Gerrit wrote a note outlining his unsuccessful
search for MS Fortran 5.1 and said that MS PowerStation 4.0 is now the
Fortran product supported by Microsoft and added:
 
>I guess that we indeed need to have a discussion to decide our "next
>generation" of Fortran compilers.  We have used Lahey to link CROPGRO and
>CERES into the RZWQM model.  So far I have been unable to figure out its
>Debugging utility yet.  We also have used Powerstation version 1.0 to link
>ADAPT with CROPGRO and CERES.  I especially like the debugging utility of
>Powerstation.  Unfortunately you need Windows to operate it and my current
>notebook has inadequate space on the harddisk to install Windows.
 
Other people suggested on the list:
 
     1)  Several different Lahey compilers
 
     2)  The new version of PowerStation
 
     3)  The freeware F2C program
 
First I like to thank people for taking time to respond to my original
message and adding some food for thought.  I have some thoughts on our "next
generation" Fortran compiler. Starting from the bottom of list and working
my way up.
 
F2C --
 
Rob Lake ([log in to unmask]) wrote--
 
>Some folks have had a great deal of success using a free program, f2c,
>to convert Fortran source to C and compiling the resulting C code.
 
I have tried f2c without much success (though probably with a bit more time
I could have gotten it to work).  However this program seems designed for an
environment where you already have a C compiler and want to compile some
pre-existing Fortran Code.  Guess I don't see too many DSSAT developers in
this category.  I don't believe in PC environment that you could easily
debug a program using this system.
 
 
New version of PowerStation --
 
Taking a quick look at the Microsoft Fortran web page:
 
           http://www.microsoft.com/fortran/fortran.htm
 
PowerStation 4.0 seems to be available only under Windows 95 (although I
won't be surprised to see it come out for Windows NT as well) and assume
that this means that it is designed to produce Windows 95 code only.  This
seems to limit the usefulness for modifying and maintaining code that runs
under the DSSAT shell.  However we may need to think about moving to Windows
95 for future versions of our programs and based on my experience with the
earlier versions of PowerStation this may be a good way to create Windows 95
programs.  Also (unlike the earlier versions of PowerStation) this is a
complete implementation of Fortran 90.
 
Lahey Compilers --
 
Everyone who uses Lahey compilers seems very happy with them.  I've not used
any of these compilers because compared to the MS products they are
expensive (at least in U.S. academic environment they are two or three times
the price) and our group needs to have several copies of what ever we chose
as the "standard" version.  At the moment their full blown Fortran 90
compiler looks very nice for doing Windows 3.x and Windows 95 programming
and they have a stripped down Fortran 90 compiler available which I assume
will create DOS .EXE files.
 
So for the future I'm inclined to move to a Fortran 90 compiler that runs
under windows (either 3.x or 95). Without having run the PowerStation or
Lahey's F90 I don't feel too qualified to decide between the two of them.
However this does not address Gerrit's problem of needing more disk space --
I'll certainly need to buy a bigger hard disk before installing a new large
programming environment.  Also going to the windows path probably means
throwing away a lot of the tools we have under DSSAT that number of people
have put a great amount of energy developing.
 
Regards
 
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Brian Baer                                                 [log in to unmask]
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