On Monday, September 16, 2019 at 8:05:55 PM UTC+10, JRR wrote:
> On Sunday, September 15, 2019 at 11:59:23 PM UTC+10, JRR wrote:
>> After some extended exchange with the support of the PGI team, I stay
>> rather frustrated. My estimate is that the compiler has ca. 70 % of the
>> capabilities of gfortran, ifort and NAG. It took several years before
>> the compiler compiled our code at all, and now it is full of run time
>> errors. Starting to deliver reproducers is a heroic task, as the
>> compiler compiles insanely slow, and the team seems not to be able to
>> run their tools from our full code. From this I estimate that PGI could
>> be at the today level of gfortran and ifort (our main compilers) in ca.
>> 2030, because I have to go case by case, wait until things are fixed,
>> and then go to the next problem. Any advice is highly appreciated.
>
And Robin Vowels sensibly responded:-
> Use Silverfrost compiler.
I read these several related postings about problems with this and that new
versions of Fortran compilers, and then read the wise responses of Robin
Vowels, and I shake my head in disbelief.
What really was wrong with "good old F77" Fortran? And in my case, with 1985
MS V3.31 which I contend till today HAS NO BUGS!. And I still use it. I
maintain I can use it for any problem solving, given external storage
availability.
Mind, you, somewhere in the early 90's, I wrote my own additional extension
library for MS 3.31, for all the bit-wise logic extensions that I needed for
my very successful commercial suite of survey generation, from most any
survey defining languages, from the IBM SAP up through Survey Monkey (for
text processing of European scripted Latin, Greek and Romaji texts, for
automatic OMR questionnaire generation, and e-mailed forms, than subsequent
data read-back, and automatic data processing, and final report writing and
graphics productions in Windows WORD). And all automatic from the first
surveyor's text.
For years, I contemplated decompiling my own copy of the trusty old M.S.
compiler and libraries to the original 16-bit code, so I could process to a
meta-logic and revert to a new compiler and libraries for the newer 32 and
64 bit operating systems. Maybe I still will. None of what I read makes any
good sense. Any Compute-Oriented department of pretty much any University I
am familiar, with could have done the same or better, long ago.
Terence