Dear Tom Tromey, you wrote on Today:
> We already handle this for C compilers. It just means writing a lot
> of cases.
Fine, but as I said, for 9 out of 10 compilers users would see the
message:
Checking for dependency style of f77 ... none
which is probably not what we want.
> Don't let me discourage you though. If you can make it work I'm sure
> we'll use it...
Thanks :-)
Akim > In particular if you consider the lexical flexibility of
Akim > Fortran. It
Akim > is reasonable to require a particular form of include/INCLUDE
Akim > etc. from the maintainers who are making the effort of using
Akim > Autotools to get some portability.
With that in mind, writing a simple tool should actually be easy.
I just wonder whether a portable shell scipt or a (probably) more
powerful but less portable perl program would be preferrable.
Last comment: If some day my Fortran/cpp patches get accepted in some
form for the autotools (btw: I'd appreciate some feedback from the
automake maintainers on the patch I suggested), we would have a portable
way of handling include files and the corresponding dependencies through
cpp. Implementing that would be trivial. This option becomes even more
attractive by the fact that INCLUDE is not part of the Fortran 77 standard
(learned that yesterday from somebody on comp.lang.fortran), it's just
a "de-facto"-Standard which most compilers support.
It might be justifiable to require package maintainers to replace
INCLUDE 'file'
by
#include "file"
which comes down to a "regexp replace in directory" command in emacs.
The result would certainly be as portable as before, because everybody
will be able to get his hands on some variant of cpp.
--
Martin Wilck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Institute for Tropospheric Research, Permoserstr. 15, D-04318 Leipzig, Germany
Tel. +49-341-2352151 / Fax +49-341-2352361
