[RFC] Removal of Fortran from the base system

[Steve Kargl]

In a recent email to freebsd-current,
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-May/063435.html
Alexander Kabaev stated that the import of GCC 4.1.1 is coming soon.

I propose that Fortran support in the base system be removed
when GCC 4.1.1 is imported.

Pros:

  1) The current Fortran 77 compiler is g77, which has been
     removed from the 4.x series of GCC.  Removal of Fortran
     support will simplify the base system and the import.

  2) There are at least two Fortran 95 compilers available in
     the Ports Collection (ie., Intel's ifc and GCC's gfortran).
     Fortran 77 is a proper subset of Fortran 95, so these 
     compilers can replace f77 (aka g77).

  3) The current Fortran Standard is Fortran 2003.  Both ifc
     and gfortran are adding the new features of F2003.  g77
     will never become a Fortran 90, 95, or 2003 compiler.

Cons:

  1) History.  A Fortran 77 compiler has been available in the
     base system since FreeBSD was known as 386BSD+patchkit.

  2) Numerous ports include Fortran code, so the Ports Collections
     would need to grow dependencies for one of the Fortran compilers
     available in ports/lang.  If GCC 4.1.1 becomes the base system
     C/C++ compilers, then I would suggest the de facto Ports
     Collection compiler should be gfortran 4.1.1.

<bike>
Metallic blue
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-- 
Steve