Re: [photran] Where to focus development efforts

[Arjan van Dijk <Arjan.van.Dijk@xxxxxxx>]

> What functionality is most conspicuously missing from Photran?
> What existing features are sub-par?
> What can we do to make Photran more appealing and approachable to new
users?


To my very humble opinion a single distribution for
installation of *everything* would be great.
Here *everything* should be selectable from a menu,
including (for Windows-people...):

- eclipse
- MinGW
- g95
- gfortran
- msys
- gdb
- any other utility that is necessary...

In case someone already has some of these, the install should suggest
updates where applicable.
A set of default settings should integrate all installed packages to a
working lot, without an immediate
need to fill out hundreds of forms for paths, keywords, libraries etc
before you can "go".
In this way someone with a good knowledge of FORTRAN, but with no
experience in Photran,
who wants to try out Photran, will not be disappointed by the large number
of packages
he/she has to find and install.

I think that a "bare" version would get sufficient attention. What I mean
is an IDE (integrated
development environment) that allows for the coding of "just fortran" in
the medieval
meaning, i.e. intended for the development of programs that you call from a
commandline and that return to
the commandline after having made some awfully difficult calculations
(justifying the use
of FORTRAN!), of which the output has been written to some files.
Without all the user interfacing, widgets, OOP and graphics that you can do
today (and which to my
opinion would automatically lead to a re-thinking of which programming
language to use!),
FORTRAN-coding in the classical sense can use the boost from a decent IDE,
especially from the (visual)
integration with a debugger, without a need for the user to learn all the
interfacing commands with that
debugger.

Maybe an (automatic?) "update" key that checks all the above packages for
newer versions?

Good luck!


Arjan