Post by JayI have a a program custom written in fortran that is running on my sco
openserver 5.04 box. When I ftp the program over to an ubuntu box and run
the program it returns a syntax error. Apparently UNIX and Linux aren't
similar enough? Any ideas as to how I could get this app running on
something newer? Is another distro of linux more compatible . Any
suggestions would be appreciated greatly.
What is the syntax error?
It's been many years since I worked much with FORTRAN, but I
wouldn't be surprised getting syntax errors when switching
compilers from different vendors. Most commercial compilers have
proprietary extensions to syntax, just as C compilers may vary in
things like #pragma interpretation. As a young, inexperienced,
programmer, I used some non-standard FORTRAN subroutine returns
which were neat, but came to bite me in the butt when I had to
move the program to a different system.
I spent quite a bit of time on a project where I had to get a
FORTRAN program written on a system that allowed 7 character
variable names at at time when the FORTRAN standard restricted
them to 6 characters. Of course the original programmers used
all 7 characters allowed, often differing only in the 7th
character. This was in the days of 80 column punch cards and
printouts so editing wasn't as easy as it is today.
Some of the first text processing programs I wrote were programs
to convert from one dialect of FORTRAN to another. These
programs were written in ALGOL, BPL (Burrough Programming
Language), or COBOL as none of the tools we take for granted on
*nix systems were available then.
At least I was working on Burroughs main frames at the time that
put error message in-line with the code, and not dealing with
IBM's compilers which would print all errors at the end of the
listing referring to line numbers -- which often had only a hazy
relationship to actual line numbers in the code.
Bill
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