[TUHS] FORTRAN

[Paul Winalski]

Another bit of history of Fortran on UNIX:

DEC initially offered f77 on Ultrix, its commercial UNIX release for
the VAX.  When the decision to market Ultrix was made, our engineering
group, which developed the compiler and software development tools
suite for VAX/VMS, offered to port some of our products, including VAX
Fortran, to Ultrix.  The Ultrix engineering group fought the proposal
tooth and nail, and so we dropped the idea.

f77 was never taken very seriously by the Fortran user community,
whereas VAX Fortran was considered the gold standard for the language.
There were repeated calls from potential Ultrix customers for DEC to
make VAX Fortran available on that platform.  Eventually circa 1985
there was a panic rush project to port VAX Fortran to Ultrix.  It was
decided that, if we were to meet the short time-to-market goal,
modifying the VAX Fortran code generator to emit zmagic object files
was out of the question.  Instead, we would have it continue to
produce VMS object files, and we would port the VMS linker to Ultrix
and teach it to understand zmagic, stab-style debug information, and
ar archives.  I led the team that produced the lk linker, which could
take in either zmagic or VAX object files and produced a.out-style
images.  lk didn't implement some of the esoteric features of ld, but
it got the job done.  The Fortran RTL was shipped as VMS-style object
files.

One feature of VMS object files is that the name of the compiler that
produced them is recorded.  The lk linker reported this in the link
maps it produced.  VAX Fortran for Ultrix customers were rather
surprised to see the variety of languages (BLISS, Pascal, BASIC,
Fortran, assembler, etc.) that had been used to implement the Fortran
RTL.

-Paul W.