Intellisense, Source Browsing, Refactoring, development tools

[Intel_C_Intel]

We're well into the 21st century, so when are we going to get FORTRAN development tools which match the age?

Developing in, say, VB.NET is a real dream. Coming back to FORTRAN and you wonder what it's been up to for the last 10 years. Why aren't the development tools as mature as the language?

Intellisense: I know the usual response is that Microsoft keep this to themselves, but surely Intel are friendly enough with MS to ask for its use with the FORTRAN compiler? After all, we are using Intel FORTRAN because we started with MS FORTRAN Powerstation (via DIGITAL, HP, COMPAQ...) and it doesn't impact on MS development tools as they clearly aren't interested in FORTRAN anymore. It makes development a breeze, using structures a doddle, calling routines & getting the argument list

Source Browsing: what happened to it? It was soooo useful, especially on big projects. I now compile code on COMPAQ to use the source browser, then go back to Intel for final compiles. Crazy! Please get it into Intel soon.

Refactoring: other language development environments have support for repackaging blocks of code into a subroutine or function; can we have one for Intel FORTRAN?

code completion and templates: adding new routines by typing SUB+space and getting the template to complete the basics with default headers, marshalling of logic blocks, automatic select case blocks on enumerations, etc.

Variable renaming: why can't we safely rename a variable using the scoping rules the code uses? ie rename all related instances across the project in one go.

I could go on, but I think you all get the gist. Please add comments, point me to useful add-ins and toold for FORTRAN / Visual Studio, tell me who to badger to get some of these things into the dev environment.

Cheers

Jonathan

[rase]

"Source Browsing: what happened to it? It was soooo useful, especially on big projects. I now compile code on COMPAQ to use the source browser, then go back to Intel for final compiles. Crazy! Please get it into Intel soon."
Jonathan describes exactly how I use the Intel compiler for larger projects at the moment . Unfortunately the advanced language features are not usable with CVF, and mixed programming with C/C++ is less convenient. Please get the Source Browser and other new development tools working for IVF as soon as possible.
Greetings, Wolf

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Initially, we did not have the rights to use that interface. Now we do, but Microsoft changed the implementation to something we'd have to do much more work to support. We're looking at alternatives.

[Jeppe_G_]

You have recently released the IVF with support for VS 2008, which we really appreciate. We do hope that your team now will have more time to implement the suggested use of intellisense etc. that has been proposed in this thread

Jeppe Grue

[Mark_Ayres]

Quoting - jeppe.grue@vattenfall.com

You have recently released the IVF with support for VS 2008, which we really appreciate. We do hope that your team now will have more time to implement the suggested use of intellisense etc. that has been proposed in this thread

Jeppe Grue

[Mark_Ayres]

Quoting - ISN Admin

We're well into the 21st century, so when are we going to get FORTRAN development tools which match the age?

Developing in, say, VB.NET is a real dream. Coming back to FORTRAN and you wonder what it's been up to for the last 10 years. Why aren't the development tools as mature as the language?

Intellisense: I know the usual response is that Microsoft keep this to themselves, but surely Intel are friendly enough with MS to ask for its use with the FORTRAN compiler? After all, we are using Intel FORTRAN because we started with MS FORTRAN Powerstation (via DIGITAL, HP, COMPAQ...) and it doesn't impact on MS development tools as they clearly aren't interested in FORTRAN anymore. It makes development a breeze, using structures a doddle, calling routines & getting the argument list

Source Browsing: what happened to it? It was soooo useful, especially on big projects. I now compile code on COMPAQ to use the source browser, then go back to Intel for final compiles. Crazy! Please get it into Intel soon.

Refactoring: other language development environments have support for repackaging blocks of code into a subroutine or function; can we have one for Intel FORTRAN?

code completion and templates: adding new routines by typing SUB+space and getting the template to complete the basics with default headers, marshalling of logic blocks, automatic select case blocks on enumerations, etc.

Variable renaming: why can't we safely rename a variable using the scoping rules the code uses? ie rename all related instances across the project in one go.

I could go on, but I think you all get the gist. Please add comments, point me to useful add-ins and toold for FORTRAN / Visual Studio, tell me who to badger to get some of these things into the dev environment.

Cheers

Jonathan

[rwg]

I think most of the FORTRAN programmers never had a look at C++ or C#. If they had, this thread would be crowded. Have a look at the free Express edition of C# to see what's possible in modern IDEs. But don't be too hard, because most of our programs are more ancient than the FORTRAN integration into VS.

[Kevin23]

It seems that FORTRAN code outlining and some features ofIntellisense in Visual Studio 2008 are realized by Lahey FORTRAN.

See the link:
http://www.lahey.com/lf72/lf72.htm#VS

Intel, don't give up!

Kevin

Quoting - ISN Admin

We're well into the 21st century, so when are we going to get FORTRAN development tools which match the age?

Developing in, say, VB.NET is a real dream. Coming back to FORTRAN and you wonder what it's been up to for the last 10 years. Why aren't the development tools as mature as the language?

Intellisense: I know the usual response is that Microsoft keep this to themselves, but surely Intel are friendly enough with MS to ask for its use with the FORTRAN compiler? After all, we are using Intel FORTRAN because we started with MS FORTRAN Powerstation (via DIGITAL, HP, COMPAQ...) and it doesn't impact on MS development tools as they clearly aren't interested in FORTRAN anymore. It makes development a breeze, using structures a doddle, calling routines & getting the argument list

Source Browsing: what happened to it? It was soooo useful, especially on big projects. I now compile code on COMPAQ to use the source browser, then go back to Intel for final compiles. Crazy! Please get it into Intel soon.

Refactoring: other language development environments have support for repackaging blocks of code into a subroutine or function; can we have one for Intel FORTRAN?

code completion and templates: adding new routines by typing SUB+space and getting the template to complete the basics with default headers, marshalling of logic blocks, automatic select case blocks on enumerations, etc.

Variable renaming: why can't we safely rename a variable using the scoping rules the code uses? ie rename all related instances across the project in one go.

I could go on, but I think you all get the gist. Please add comments, point me to useful add-ins and toold for FORTRAN / Visual Studio, tell me who to badger to get some of these things into the dev environment.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Steven_L_Intel1]

We're familiar with Lahey's implementation - thanks.

[abhimodak]

FYI: The same is true for PGI as well as SilverFrost, although to a varying degree.

But I think the support for F2003 must have been quite a tiring task. Add to that versions of Visual Studio and OS etc.

With compiler version 11.1's flavors slowly stabilizing, may be in near future some of the resources will free up...Am I just dreaming? :)

Abhi

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Yes, sadly, you are. We have to rewrite most of our VS integration code for VS2010 and we have F2003 to finish up and F2008 features to add. Not enough cycles to do everything we would like. But some things that have been asked for for a long time are being done.

VS2010 provides new opportunities for enhancements, so who knows what we might be able to do there.

[Darrell]

Can anyone confirm that Photran built on top of Eclipse can do all this for Fortran & it's free? It's not a compiler but a IDE plug-in to make Eclipse syntax aware of Fortran. I hear you provide the command line to the compiler/linker via a make file but it's worth it just to use the Outline, Refactoring, and intellisense?

We're still trying to get Intel Fortran 11.1 to run with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008.

As a Plan B there is always ftoc then ctoj--convert the Fortran 77 to ANSI C then the C to java then use the Eclipse IDE. :-)

[John4]

Quoting - Wayne

Can anyone confirm that Photran built on top of Eclipse can do all this for Fortran & it's free? It's not a compiler but a IDE plug-in to make Eclipse syntax aware of Fortran. I hear you provide the command line to the compiler/linker via a make file but it's worth it just to use the Outline, Refactoring, and intellisense?

Short answer: no.

Long answer:

The Photran plugin still has lots of issues, say:

* Installing on Windows is still rusty (see http://wiki.eclipse.org/PTP/photran/documentation/photran5#Additional_Instructions_for_Windows_Users).

* The runtime is not very stable (e.g., it's quite common to get a "java.lang.NullPointerException" crash).

* The outline feature only works well under the standard scenario, otherwise you get "Syntax Error: Unexpected identifier", making the feature useless. For example, it seems to dislike preprocessing lines; if your code contains any kind of extension or new feature (e.g., a boz literal) the outline won't work ---in the past, it even disliked code that used [ ] instead of (/ /), but that seems to have been fixed in newer versions.

* The managed make feature is just a demo (i.e., not intended for heavy usage).

* The refactoring feature requires increasing the VM memory... a lot (e.g., 3 GB or so, for 5000 lines of code, just to add "implicit none" to every subroutine).

Quoting - Wayne

We're still trying to get Intel Fortran 11.1 to run with Microsoft Visual C++ 2008.

May I ask, what seems to be your problem?

Quoting - Wayne

As a Plan B there is always ftoc then ctoj--convert the Fortran 77 to ANSI C then the C to java then use the Eclipse IDE. :-)

All that in order to use an outline-, refactoring- or intellisense-like feature? I always assume that if someone is using C/C++/Fortran, then performance matters a lot, but that might not be your case. Anyway, some text editors might provide outline- and intellisense-like behavior (e.g., Geany), so you might want to take a look at those before setting Plan B into motion.