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From: link@sag4.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Proprietary lock-in of customers (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Message-ID: <16823@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 11 Nov 88 05:11:09 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <44400030@hcx2> <397@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Lines: 40

In article <397@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
>
> Can you show me a cost-effective way to port from proprietary operating
>systems of Wang, Hewlett-Packard, Data General (AOS), IBM(OS), DEC(VMS) ...
>to standard UNIX (Unix System V release 3) ?

No, but I can show you how to get from VMS to a SUN effortlessly.
It's a preprocessor called f77cvt supplied by SUN to steal DEC
customers.

And it works! I compiled 110 subroutines today into a library; only
8 did not compile the first attempt, due to a "feature" of f77cvt
which causes problems by insisting on sticking an END into code
fragments to be INCLUDEd.

Once I got the library built, I then compiled some of my more
substantial programs. The only problems encountered were where I used
the VMS system clock, a trivial problem.

f77cvt takes VMS.FOR files and converts them to sun.f files.
The sun.f code is quite ugly - indentations are all left justified back
to column 7, and messages are written all over the file.
However, IT WORKS!

After compiling & linking, I simply delete the sun.f file and keep the
original VMS version.

I think that the vendor "lock-in" problem is just as much the fault of
UNIX system vendors as it is the vendors of proprietary operating
systems.  SUN has shown forcefully that it intends to attract DEC
customers. If other UNIX vendors put some effort into easing software
migration problems, as SUN has, there would not be a lock-in problem.


Dr. Richard Link
Space Sciences Laboratory
University of California, Berkeley

Disclaimer: I am not connected with SUN, and I like VMS better anyway.
			So there!