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 ============================================================================= Brian Baer [log in to unmask] --------------------------------------+--------------------------------------- Program Analyst | Acting Center Coordinator Dept. of Crop & Soil Science | The Listening Ear A574 Plant and Soil Science Building | Crisis Intervention Center Michigan State University | 423 Albert Street East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1325 | East Lansing, Michigan 48823 (517) 353-8537 | (517) 337-1717 =============================================================================