f2c is a program to convert Fortran 77 to C code, developed at

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

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to be implemented, the "f77" program by

Feldman Feldman is a German and Ashkenazi Jewish surname. Notable people with the surname include: Academics * Arthur Feldman (born 1949), American cardiologist * Chanda Feldman (born 1976), American poet * David B. Feldman, American psychologist * Da ...

and

Weinberger Weinberger is a German surname. Notable people with the surname include: *A. G. Weinberger, Romanian musician * Alan Weinberger, American businessman * Alycia J. Weinberger, Carnegie Institution staffer *Caspar Weinberger (1917–2006), America ...

. 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 In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...

directly. The f2c program was released as

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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 als ...

, 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

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