Re: [TUHS] FORTRAN

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.