Re: Problems with f2c

henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Wed, 29 Jul 1992 22:07:14 GMT

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Related articles
Problems with f2c lacey@cps.msu.edu (1992-07-29)
Re: Problems with f2c henry@zoo.toronto.edu (1992-07-29)
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Newsgroups: comp.compilers
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 22:07:14 GMT
References: 92-07-105
Keywords: Fortran, C, translator

In article 92-07-105 lacey@cps.msu.edu writes:
>I am unhappy with how f2c hands PARAMETER statements...
>[the resulting C isn't too readable]


This is really a fundamental consequence of f2c's objectives: it is not
meant to produce good-looking C code. In the opinion of the authors, as
expressed in their documentation, fully automatic translation to clean,
maintainable C was impractical, so they didn't try. Changing this is
going to require much more than just a fix for PARAMETER handling, I would
suspect.


Does anybody know of any more recent work on getting readable code out of
fully-automatic language translation? (Fully automatic only, please;
semi-automatic systems that can do it with human help have been around
since before f2c.)
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology, henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
[The commercial Fortran to C translators such as Promula and For-C try a lot
harder than f2c does to produce legible Fortran. -John]
--


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