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From: dhandly@hpcupt3.cup.hp.com (Dennis Handly)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp
Subject: Re: HP-720 vs IBM-320 vs Sparc2
Message-ID: <48580034@hpcupt3.cup.hp.com>
Date: 8 Jun 91 05:59:10 GMT
References: <1991Jun6.151807.670@idaho.uucp>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Cal Language Lab
Lines: 33

>/ rhodesii@idaho.uucp (III) /  8:18 am  Jun  6, 1991 /
>      No real problem unless your application was trying to use unit 7
>      for something else. I guess this is historical HP (?)

I thought IBM did this too?  (it has been > 20 years since I used it)

>   4. Symbolic debugger- The symbolic debugger adb seemed to be powerful,

You probably mean XDB.  ADB is an assembly level debugger.

>   5. The +T option of f77 is nice in that it will provide a trace back for
>      many exceptions and range errors (NaN generators). 
>      However, the traceback doesn't
>      provide line numbers but merely routine names and addresses. 

I assume that it would work better, display line numbers, if you were
debugging it with XDB and got a signal.

>      Well I had about 2100 files and then I couldn't cat' them back together.
>  >cat*.f > all &

There is a command, xargs, that enables you to break up the number of files
on a command to a fixed limit.  (Or read them from a file)  i.e. you could
cat or compile 100 files at a time.

>HP-720     2.7  f77 +O2 +Obb1200
                             ^^^^
How did you pick the value 1200 for the number of basic blocks?  Is this
big enough such that you didn't get any warnings about dropping to level
1 optimization??

I hope this information is useful.  I work on the COBOL and Pascal compilers
but I know a little, very :-), about Fortran...