Re: Which target language do I choose?

henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer) wrote:


[ .... portability of language X, from the viewpoint of "to how many
              different machines has a compiler/interpreter for X been
              ported" .... ]


> FORTRAN is a bit less obviously a loss, since it's invariably compiled
> and many of the compilers are good ones. However, it is a relatively
> impoverished language (remember, most implementations are FORTRAN 77
> at best -- Fortran 90 is too rare to be relevant here), especially in
> the area of data structures. It also tends to be found mostly on the
> larger systems, since its emphasis is on floating-point computation,
> and that may be a handicap if you're interested in portability to
> quite small machines. (There are C compilers for many machines that
> are too small to have floating-point hardware, but not FORTRAN
> compilers.)


I wouldn't be too sure about this argument; see for instance the following in
the egcs mailing lists archives (http://egcs.cygnus.com):


QUOTE
From: "D. Jeff Dionne" <jeff@maribor.pfnet.com>
Subject: Hello, Contrib Back end
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 12:18:35 -0400 (EDT)


Hi all.


Thanks for creating this project, I think it's very important to merge
these efforts. I'll contribute back end support for the 3-Com PalmPilot
PDA, done by myself, Kresten Krab Thorup, Ian Goldberg and others, and
maintained by myself. about 150k patches to gcc, small ones for binutils
and gdb.


Cheers, Looking forward to spice2g6 on PalmPilot when FORTRAN gets
merged (I know, I'm sick :-)


D. Jeff Dionne.
UNQUOTE


[ FYI, FORTRAN - g77 - *was* already merged in the egcs sources at that time
]


Now, perhaps the PalmPilot *has* floating point support - I don't know - but
you can't argue with the fact that it's a small machine :-)


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Toon Moene (mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
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g77 Support: mailto:fortran@gnu.org; NWP: http://www.knmi.nl/hirlam
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