Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!munnari.oz.au!murdu!duty
From: duty@murdu.oz (Duty Programmer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: The worst compiler in the whole wide world
Message-ID: <1886@murdu.oz>
Date: 9 Jul 90 06:24:25 GMT
References: <16430@windy.dsir.govt.nz> <2330.26922b0b@csc.anu.oz> <16521@windy.dsir.govt.nz>
Organization: Computing Services, Melb. Uni.
Lines: 35

In article <16521@windy.dsir.govt.nz> SRWMSPW@windy.dsir.govt.nz writes:
>In article <2330.26922b0b@csc.anu.oz>, axt654@csc.anu.oz writes:
>> In article <16430@windy.dsir.govt.nz>, SRWMSPW@windy.dsir.govt.nz writes:
>>> 
>>> 	Whats the worst fortran compiler in the whole wide world?
>>> 
>>> 	ANSWER: THE DEC F77 ULTRIX RISC COMPILER
>>> 
>>> 	In 20 years of scientific computing i have experienced some 
>>> bad ones (IBM H extended springs to mind) but never never anything this bad.
>             .
>I would say 50 % of the programs I have tried to compile have failed in 
>some way due to compiler bugs.
>	
That sounds pretty impressive. My vote is the Data General AOS/VS fortran
compiler. Admittedly most of the problems arise from using AOS/VS multitasking
(similar to threads in Mach), but in five years the DG boys have failed time
after time to eradicate these. In fact, we have had to leave just about every
release of the compiler on the system, because you never know what new bugs
will have been introduced in the new releases! You often have to compile
different parts of the code with different versions of the compiler in order
to get the whole program to work! Certain F77 file I/O statements (BACKSPACE,
ENDFILE, INQUIRE) had to be eradicated from the code to stop programs from
bombing completely.

Curiously, the AOS/VS C compiler appears to be completely bug-free.

Richard Brown

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Richard Brown                     | E-mail: pbrown@munda.ph.unimelb.EDU.AU
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