May I add a comment on Ratfor.
Ratfor is an ancestor of C, it has been widely used since the 80's. How can you
suppress such a facility without any survey of who is still using it? I am not
saying who is still writing new softwares with it, but who is still compiling
old scientific softwares still written in ratfor. I have been using Ratfiv
since the 80's, (ratfor->rat4->ratfiv) and recently (2 years ago) built a
Mandrake rpm for ratfiv. The advantage of ratfiv (Institute of Cancer
Research) over ratfor was the easier way of programming. Ratfiv was able to
output fortran77 on Vax machines. Ratfiv was also written in ratfiv itself and
therefore was able to bootstrap (from original fortran sources) and this is
different from the classical ratfor compiled in C.
Since the rpm was built, some programmers have used it and reported bugs to
Mandriva bugzilla which means that ratfor (or ratfiv) users using the Fortran
code still exist.
Please let ratfor survive. What the problem with it?
I love gcc -o foo foo.r
And unfortunately with gcc 4.1 and gcc -v foo foo.r I get a message
"Ratfor compiler not installed on this system"
and this is wrong. In earlier version we got
ratfor -v -o /home/brouard/tmp/ccmkIRE foo.r
If there is no performance question please keep ratfor using f95. I compiled
fortran output of ratfor programme and there is no problem.
Ratfor C compiler exist since a while (20 years!) and gcc has ever been able to
use the .r extension to produce the fortran code. There is no reason to change
now.

Comment #1 from pinskia at gcc dot gnu dot org 2006-05-08 22:15
Well this is the first time we got a bug report requesting support back. In
fact this is only the second time I heard about ratfor, the first time was when
it was reported it was broken.

Comment #2 from nicolas dot brouard at libertysurf dot fr 2006-05-08 22:38
Subject: Re: Add back RatFor support

Many thanks for your prompt and satisfactorily answer of support back.

Nicolas
Le lundi 08 mai 2006 * 22:15 +0000, pinskia at gcc dot gnu dot org a
crit :

Comment #1 from pinskia at gcc dot gnu dot org 2006-05-08 22:15
Well this is the first time we got a bug report requesting support back. In
fact this is only the second time I heard about ratfor, the first time was when
it was reported it was broken.

Comment #3 from tobi at gcc dot gnu dot org 2006-05-09 09:41
I don't mind putting it back in, Jim described what needs to be done in
PR24357. I don't have a ratfor processor to test with, so I'd prefer if
someone else wrote (i.e. copied from gcc < 4.0) and tested the necessary specs.

Comment #4 from rchapman at acm dot org 2006-05-17 03:44
(In reply to comment #3)
I don't mind putting it back in, Jim described what needs to be done in
PR24357. I don't have a ratfor processor to test with, so I'd prefer if
someone else wrote (i.e. copied from gcc < 4.0) and tested the necessary specs.

I too would love to see Ratfor support reinstated. I really appreciate the
expertise and efforts of the developers and maintainers and am sure that they
always have a long list of things "to do". Unfortunately, I do not have the
'smarts' to write and test the necessary specs.

I have been maintaining a branch of 'PD Ratfor in C' derived from 'Ratfor in C'
(as posted by Yigit [oz] June 19, 1985, in 'net.sources' on Usenet with
subsequent modifications by Ken Yap and W. Bauske) and have used it extensively
with GCC versions prior to 4.x on a variety of platforms.

I would be glad to provide this 'ratfor' packaged as a GNU Build System
distribution tarball to anyone who can write and test the specs. The tarball
contains a conventional 'configure', 'make', 'make install' distribution
(including man page, info document, and two simple ratfor test programs) that
has been validated for linux (RedHat & Fedora) and MingW.

Thanks for your time and attention.