[SciPy-Dev] PR for bounded linear least squares

[Charles R Harris]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 3:48 PM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 3:25 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla.molden at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> Skipper Seabold <jsseabold at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > I guess I have a question. Does anyone have an option on the best way
>> > forward for the Fortran 90 code? We have to stick to Fortran 77 code,
>> > unfortunately, so my options are to either fix the code incrementally
>> > for F77 or ... ?
>>
>> It is basically undoable. Do you know Fortran 77 that well?
>>
>> I learned Fortran 90 about 20 years ago. I couldn't write valid Fortran 77
>> even if I wanted to -- even though I am fluent in Fortran 90. And that is
>> probably the case for most scientists that use Fortran today.
>>
>> If you tried, you would even have to change loops into gotos. Good luck on
>> that...
>>
>> Coding Fortran 77 in 2014 is not worth the effort.
>>
>>
>> > What do people think about using f2c to generate and
>> > include C code? I've never done this before, and I assume it comes
>> > with its own can of worms.
>>
>> This will not help you out.
>>
>> f2c is a Fortran 77 compiler.
>>
>> f2c and g77 was written by the same person (as one-man projects), and they
>> basically do the same except for what they emit (C or machine code,
>> respectively). The original f77 compiler was a shell script that invoked
>> f2c and system cc. g77 came along because pointer aliasing prevented C
>> compilers from doing certain optimizations (e.g. register allocation).
>> With
>> a modern C compiler it is probably better to use f2c than the g77
>> compiler,
>> but it will still be inferior to modern Fortran compilers (gfortran,
>> ifort,
>> absoft).
>>
>>
> Wasn't there a Cython project for wrapping Fortran? IIRC, it had the
> opposite problem, it could wrap newer versions of Fortran but couldn't hack
> Fortran 77.
>
>
And a bit of googling turns up fwrap, which stalled before completion. The
current advice seems to be to use ISO_C_BINDING and then Cython.

Chuck
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