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Aleksandar Donev sent the indented text: > [...] > > But there are several things that I don't at all enjoy about it: > > 1. It is written in Fortran! Who on earth said that a Fortran > preprocessor needs to be written in Fortran? Aren't we focusing on > language interdependance? For example, since CHARACTER datums can > not be allocatable even in Fortran 90 (they are apparently treated > differently from strings--arrays of datums), f90ppr has some > silly and very anoying limits on the length of files, number of > commenting lines, etc. Also, in its naked form, it does not accept > command line arguments. I mean, why not do this right in C++ or C? > [...] I have had very good results writing code in Perl which modifies and/or emits Fortran code. I feel it is the natural language to use for text manipulation, in much the same way that Fortran is the natural language for scientific calculations. Perl is also open source, available for ``free'', and has been portred to a huge variety of platforms. I have found Perl tools to be very useful, flexible, and portable. There *is* a bias against non-Fortran code in the Fortran community, however, so YMMV as regards widespread acceptance of a pre-processor written in Perl, C, or C++. The upside is that there are ``free'' interpreters and compilers for those languages, so your non-Fortran preprocessor for Fortran would probably be easy to distribute to any interested parties, particularly (IMO) if written in Perl. -- John Jeffrey Venier, B.A., M.Stat. Programmer Analyst III Section of Computer Science Department of Biomathematics The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas [log in to unmask] +1 (713) 792-2622 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%