Re: Fortran 9x: time for a decision

[Steven G. Johnson]

On Fri, 1 Nov 2002, Paul Eggert wrote:
> It sounds like there is no perfect solution here, but I think it'd be
> better to be consistent with GNU make.
> 
> The GNU Make convention is that FC and FFLAGS are a pair, and F77 and
> F77FLAGS are a pair.  By default they have the same meaning, since the
> default value of F77 is "$(FC)", and the default value of F77FLAGS is
> "$(FFLAGS)".  The default value of FFLAGS is empty; the default value
> of FC is "fortran" on VMS, "cf77" on Cray, "xlf" on _IBMR2, "fc" on
> Convex, and "f77" otherwise.

I agree that consistency with GNU Make is a good thing, but I shudder at
the thought of the howls of protest that might arise from all the existing
Fortran users.  

Moreover, I suspect that consistency with automake (which uses $F77 and
$FFLAGS) should take priority over consistency with the implicit rules in
GNU Make.

> Perhaps these conventions are wrong or outdated, but if we use
> different conventions in Autoconf we should endeavor to have those
> conventions installed into GNU Make too.

I agree.

Steven