From: William Clodius on
Uno <merrilljensen(a)q.com> wrote:

> dpb wrote:
> > Uno wrote:
> > ...
> >
> >> The topics I could cover well are
> >> 1) How to use gfortran on windows
> >> 2) How to use gfortran off a memory stick
> > ...
> >
> > If anything, I'd say those topics probably belong in their own
> > documentation as addenda perhaps for subsets of the overall gfortran
> > user base, not in the gfortran doc's themselves.
>
> What is the gfortran user base?
A user base that includes Linux and Mac OSX (and probably other UNIX
based systems) as well as windows. I suspect a larger fraction of the
user base is non-windows.

--
Bill Clodius
los the lost and net the pet to email
From: Janus Weil on

> >> I'd like to see gfortran.pdf have some screenshots and more examples.
>
> > Screenshots? Are you serious? Why would the gfortran manual need
> > screenshots? That's ridiculous.
>
> > Examples are always useful, though (in particular for beginners).
>
> There is nothing visual about this help manual.

Well, gfortran is a command-line tool after all, not some overblown
point-and-click all-in-one IDE. So, what do you expect? Screenshots of
a terminal showing some gfortran command? How useful would that be?

Overall, I think the gfortran manual is pretty helpful. Maybe not in
the sense of a beginners' step-by-step tutorial (that's not what it's
intended to be), but it surely is useful for looking up gfortran's
various flags and options and even Fortran language stuff (I often use
it to look up some intrinsic function that I need, etc).

The worst manuals I know are those which spend half a page on a nice
and colorful screenshot of a complete Windows desktop, just to show
you how to click on an 'Ok' button.


> I also consider it a distinct possibility that Jerry Delisle, Tobias
> Burnus, mathematican steve etc. don't want me fouling up gfortran.pdf
> with my puerile pictures.  I am becoming quite adept with GIMP, and can
> make a clean .jpg image of a size appropriate for the pdf format that is
> less a 100 k.

I would say it very much depends what your pictures show, however ...


> The topics I could cover well are
> 1)  How to use gfortran on windows
> 2)  How to use gfortran off a memory stick

.... I think in general the wiki would be much better suited for the
stuff you have in mind than the offical GCC manual (as already noted
by others).

Cheers,
Janus
From: glen herrmannsfeldt on
Janus Weil <jaydub66(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
(snip)

> Well, gfortran is a command-line tool after all, not some overblown
> point-and-click all-in-one IDE. So, what do you expect? Screenshots of
> a terminal showing some gfortran command? How useful would that be?

In the IBM S/360 and S/370 Fortran manual the sample programs
are printed as written on a "Fortran Coding Form."

In the days of cards, there were pads of such forms, with the columns
all marked out. That is, a fatter line between columns 5 and 6,
between 6 and 7, and between 72 and 73. Column numbers printed
at the top, and a place for the program name, programmer name,
date, and page number (m of n). They don't show the program
as it would look punched on cards.

While I always punched all my own cards, it seems that some would
write the program on such a form, then have someone else punch it,
verify it, and return the deck with the form.

A screen shot of emacs or vi editing a Fortran program also
doesn't seem so applicable to the gfortran manual.

-- glen
From: dpb on
glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
....
> While I always punched all my own cards, it seems that some would
> write the program on such a form, then have someone else punch it,
> verify it, and return the deck with the form.
....

In the organization at which I worked (and I think fairly common),
engineers weren't allowed access to the keypunch machines except for the
one-off correction there was one freestanding machine (in an office of
1000-1500 engineers); that's what the roomful (30-some) of keypunch
operators were there for. I remember "keypunch Shirley" quite vividly,
in fact... :)

--
From: Richard Maine on
dpb <none(a)non.net> wrote:

> glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> ...
> > While I always punched all my own cards, it seems that some would
> > write the program on such a form, then have someone else punch it,
> > verify it, and return the deck with the form.
> ...
> In the organization at which I worked (and I think fairly common),
> engineers weren't allowed access to the keypunch machines except for the
> one-off correction there was one freestanding machine (in an office of
> 1000-1500 engineers); that's what the roomful (30-some) of keypunch
> operators were there for. I remember "keypunch Shirley" quite vividly,
> in fact... :)

We could do it either way, but I always punched my own for 2 reasons.

1. I got a lot faster turnaround by punching my own cards instead of
submitting them to the keypunch service and waiting until the next day
to get them back.

2. Comparing my keypunch and handwriting skills... well there barely is
any comparison. Sending my handwriting ti the keypunch operators would
have counted as abuse... both of them and of myself. Not that my
keypunching was great, but it beat my handwriting by a lot, and did
gradually improve.

In my first few years, when I was still a co-op work-study peon, I'd
fairly often end up doing the keypunching for some of the senior
engineers in our office. I once got quite a lecture for "improving" the
computer code as I typed it. The lecture was indeed deserved. Besides
the basic issue of that being the wrong way to suggest improvements (I
just did it without mentioing that I had done anything other than play
keypuncher), in retrospect, some of the "improvements" I made probably
weren't good ideas anyway. For example, I would see things like
2*some_other_literal, and do the multiplication myself instead of
leaving it that way. I probably had some notion that this would be more
efficient (which probably wasn't even so), and failed to recognize that
the original form was more clear to the reader in context. Hey, I was 18
at the time.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgment comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgment.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain