f2c is a program to
convert Fortran 77 to
C code, developed at
Bell Laboratories
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several lab ...
. The standalone f2c program was based on the core of the first complete Fortran 77 compiler to be implemented, the "f77" program by Stuart Feldman, Feldman and Peter J. Weinberger, 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 machine code directly.
The f2c program was released as free software 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, were made available as C libraries via conversion with f2c. The f2c program also influenced the development of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU g77 compiler, which uses a modified version of the f2c runtime library, 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
f2csource code and documentation, at Netlib.
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Fortran compilers
Compilers
Source-to-source compilers
C (programming language)
Free and open source compilers
Free software programmed in C