R-alpha: thoughts on batch and fortran

[Thomas Lumley]

On Thu, 21 Aug 1997, Jim Lindsey wrote:
> Fortran:
>   I think that, if .Fortran is to exist, then the full fortran library
> (except I/O) should be available, not just those functions required by
> the basic R. I am thinking in particular of the complex functions that
> I require for Kalman filtering in carma (soon to be released as a
> dynamic library). Having the full f2c library linked in (-lf2c, when it
> works under Linux - see the recent comments of my son, Patrick) does
> not take more space unless it is actually used because it is dynamic.
> carma will not work without these functions so how can I release
> something that will not work for most users?

I don't think it's as simple as this.  If you can assume all users have
libf2c then your carma Makefile can link it with -lf2c.  This would be
ideal as I think some versions of Unix do still load libraries when the
program loads, whether or not they are actually used.

The real problem comes with machines that don't have f2c.  Most of our
machines here don't, for example, as we tend to use real Fortran when we
want it.  We currently don't assume that everyone has f2c as then we would
not need to distribute C versions of Fortran code. This would have the
added advantage that people who use real Fortran don't have to load
libf2c. 

If we don't assume that everyone has f2c then people distributing
libraries need to distribute all or part of libf2c. Source to libf2c is
readily available. 

I asked for opinions on this question a while back and didn't get any.


Thomas Lumley
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