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From a factulty member who is trying out Photran.
I guess we all know about this stuff, but just to keep
it all in perspective . . .
===========================================
I downloaded Photran and Cygwin and gave Photran a try using your
instructions (future chapter 11 in /The F Compiler and Tools/ book?).
Photran surely has some great potential. However, in the limited time I
have had to look at it, it seems to have several weaknesses. First is
the need to invoke flush before a read operation (if you want to run the
program within the IDE). I hate to introduce something that is not
normally needed into a program just so it can be run within the IDE.
The second shortcoming is the debugger. I think students will find it
somewhat confusing. For example, the variable display is somewhat
counterintuitive. As you point out, the variable names have underscores
appended and the array indices are all wrong. I realize why this is so
but a beginning programmer who knows nothing about C will find it odd.
When a program is running in the debugger, program output is not
visible. Worse yet, there is apparently no way to execute a read
statement. At least, if there is I haven’t discovered it. For example,
if I put a breakpoint in your a_simple_program example at the print
statement immediately following the read statement and then press the
resume button, the program just hangs. The only way I’ve found to get
rid of the program is to go to the debug window, right-click, and choose
the ‘terminate and remove’ option. As far as I can tell, it is
impossible to debug interactive programs. I haven’t tried to debug
programs that use file access so I don’t know if that will work or not.
I know you aren’t responsible for Photran but I thought I’d give you my
first impressions since support for it is included in the latest F release.
--
Walt Brainerd +1-877-355-6640 (voice & fax)
The Fortran Company +1-520-760-1397 (outside USA)
6025 N. Wilmot Road walt@xxxxxxxxxxx
Tucson, AZ 85750 USA http://www.fortran.com
