C to Fortran translators: do they exist?

forall · ‎05-26-2005

Are there any scripts/utilities (free or commercial) that can translate code written in C (or C+ or C++) into Fortran? I have found some stuff that converts Fortran into C but nothing that goes the opposite way... thanks in advance.

ingo_berg · ‎05-26-2005

They don't exist as far as I know.

One could implement a translator from C to Fortran for the common subset of features. The problem is no real world C program uses only those features. You wouldnt be able to translate much more than a "hello world" sucessfully.

For instance even Fortran 95 does not support allocation or derived type arrays (although intel implemented it as an extension) This is done all over the place in C programms. Linked lists commonly used in C are impossible to translate in a generic way to Fortran without support for pointers. Translating i/o function with a variable number of parameters like printf would be very difficult.

Regards,
Ingo

Steven_L_Intel1 · ‎05-26-2005

Allocation of derived type arrays is standard F95. Do you mean a derived type component that is ALLOCATABLE? That indeed is an extension to F95, standard in F03. But standard F95 has POINTER components, which comes much closer to C semantics than does ALLOCATABLE.

ingo_berg · ‎05-26-2005

Yes that is what i meant. By the way this is a crucial feature for me. I hope i'm gonna see more F2003 features in intel fortran in the near future.

emc-nyc · ‎05-27-2005

There was a C2F translator listed at the Fortran Company, however the link ( http://home.cfl.rr.com/davegemini/C2F.ZIP ) appears to be dead. You could try googling for it, but it's probably easier to get a C compiler.