19970811 -*-text-*- g77 libU77 ---------- This directory contains an implementation of most of the `traditional' Unix libU77 routines, mostly an interface to libc and libm routines and some extra ones for time and date etc. It's intended for use with g77, to whose configuration procedure it's currently tied, but should be compatible with f2c otherwise, if using the same f2c.h. The contents of libU77 and its interfaces aren't consistent across implementations. This one is mostly taken from documentation for (an old version of) the Convex implementation and the v2 SunPro one. As of g77 version 0.5.20, most of these routines have been made into g77 intrinsics. Some routines have a version with a name prefixed by `vxt', corresponding to the VMS Fortran versions, and these should be integrated with g77's intrinsics visibility control. A few routines are currently missing; in the case of `fork', for instance, because they're probably not useful, and in the case of `qsort' and those for stream-based i/o handling, because they need more effort/research. The configuration should weed out those few which correspond to facilities which may not be present on some Unix systems, such as symbolic links. It's unclear whether the interfaces to the native library random number routines should be retained, since their implementation is likely to be something one should avoid assiduously. This library has been tested it under SunOS4.1.3 and Irix5.2 and there has been some feedback from Linux; presumably potential problems lie mainly with systems with impoverished native C library support which haven't been properly taken care of with autoconf. There's another GPL'd implementation of this stuff which I only found out about recently (despite having looked) and I haven't yet checked how they should be amalgamated. Dave Love Aug '95 (minor changes by Craig Burley Aug '97)