f2c is a program to

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Fortran 77 to C code, developed at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

. The standalone f2c program was based on the core of the first complete Fortran 77

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

to be implemented, the "f77" program by

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and Weinberger. Because the f77 compiler was itself written in C and relied on a C compiler back end to complete its final compilation step, it and its derivatives like f2c were much more portable than compilers generating

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directly. The f2c program was released as

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and subsequently became one of the most common means to compile Fortran code on many systems where native Fortran compilers were unavailable or expensive. Several large Fortran libraries, such as

LAPACK LAPACK ("Linear Algebra Package") is a standard software library for numerical linear algebra. It provides routines for solving systems of linear equations and linear least squares, eigenvalue problems, and singular value decomposition. It also ...

, were made available as C libraries via conversion with f2c. The f2c program also influenced the development of the GNU g77 compiler, which uses a modified version of the f2c runtime libraries.

References

* S. I. Feldman and P. J. Weinberger
A portable Fortran 77 compiler
In ''UNIX Time Sharing System Programmer's Manual'', volume 2. AT&T Bell Laboratories, tenth edition, 1990. * S. I. Feldman, David M. Gay, Mark W. Maimone, and N. L. Schryer,

" AT&T Bell Laboratories technical report, 1990. Also the paper of the same title by S. I. Feldman, published in ''ACM SIGPLAN Fortran Forum'', vol. 9, issue 2, p. 21–22 (1990). * Th
f2c
source code and documentation, at

Netlib Netlib is a repository of software for scientific computing maintained by AT&T, Bell Laboratories, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Netlib comprises many separate programs and libraries. Most of the code is written in ...

. {{refend Fortran compilers Compilers Source-to-source compilers C (programming language) Free compilers and interpreters Free software programmed in C

See also

References