[SATLUG] Re: FORTRAN woes

[Bruce Dubbs]

Mike wrote:

I'm glad you got it working.

> Adding to the confusion, the original author was lazy and
> instead of listing the individual files that should be compiled, he just
> had
> a simple statement in his Makefile to compile all the *.f files into *.o.
> He just ignored the "Missing END statement" error messages from the
> fragment
> files.  But then you have someone like me who comes in and sees error
> messages and thinks that something is wrong.
> 
> I'm so frustrated because a lot of this research and work could have been
> avoided had the original author done something to distinguish his code
> fragments from the rest of the code or at least written his Makefile so
> that
> errors wouldn't be a natural product of running it.  At least I got it
> figured out before the weekend.

Yes, the most frustrating part of picking up from someone else is that
the original author often has no concept of software maintenance.  If it
works for him, it should work for everyone.  Right?  Wrong!

If this were an open source project, I doubt that he could get away with
that.  Take a look at the major open source projects.  They all have
programming standards.  Just working is not enough.

  -- Bruce