[Rd] Fortran coding standards

[Vivek Rao]

--- Prof Brian Ripley <ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Apr 2007, Vivek Rao wrote:

<snip>
 
> Note that currently we expect only Fortran 77 to be
> used in R and 
> (preferably) its packages, as there still are users
> with a Fortran 77 
> compiler and nothing later.  One major group are
> those on Windows, and it 
> is hoped that that will move to gcc 4.2.x in 2007. 

I don't understand this statement. Windows does not
come with C or Fortran 77 compilers preinstalled,
either. Windows binaries for the free Fortran 95
compilers gfortran and g95 do exist, and I use them
daily.

<snip>
 
> The Fortran code in R itself is (entirely, I think)
> imported from 
> elsewhere, e.g. from EISPACK or LAPACK or Netlib. 
> We have little interest 
> in changing long-established code, and as the recent
> thread 'eigen in 
> beta' shows, everytime we update such code someone
> thinks there is a new 
> bug in R.

That is understandable, but it also suggests that
defects in code in contributed packages should be
fixed 
before it is "published" and people start to rely on
it.

The main benefit of the R project is the provision of
working software to end users, who do not care about
the style of the underlying C and Fortran code. A
secondary benefit is that it provides a source of code
for statistical algorithms that programmers can
incorporate in their own programs. This audience will
care about the quality of the code.