Re: [photran] Global Variables

["Lear, Matthew H." <Matthew.Lear@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph,

Thanks for your reply.  I have the opposite problem as you: I am a
reasonably good Fortran programmer with little/no JAVA/C experience.  What I
would love to see in Photran is the ability to monitor global variables in
local subroutines.  For instance,

Common.f90 has:
    Module common

        integer,parameter :: n=100

        Real, allocatable :: my_array(:)

        type struct
            integer :: int_blah
            real :: real_blah
        end type struct

        type (struct),allocatable :: my_struct(:)

    End module common

Main.f90 has:
    Program test

        use common

        allocate(my_array(n))
        allocat(my_struct(n))

        <do suff on my_array and my_struct>

    end program test

What I would like to do is during the debug process step through main and be
able to see the variables n, my_array, and my_struct from within test
without resorting to print/write statements.

I don't know what was so special about Visual Fortran but it is able to do
this.  Nothing in Linux has (to my knowledge) been able to.  I have tried
other IDEs (Code Forge, DDD, Kdevelop, etc.) and none have been able to do
this either.

Regards,
Matt



> From: Ralph Johnson <johnson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Reply-To: Photran Information <photran@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:38:55 -0500
> To: Photran Information <photran@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: Re: [photran] Global Variables
> 
>> Not clear to me where (free) Photran is going and the speed with which it
>> might get thereŠ
> 
> I'm head of the group at UIUC that produced Photran.  I have an idea
> where Photran is going, but I don't know how long it will take to get
> there.  That is the way it is with
> low-budget software development.
> 
> The hard-core development is being done by one person, Jeff Overbey.
> He is focusing on program representation and program transformation.
> He is not thinking much about better user interface or how the
> debugger works.  Jeff is trying to do work that will lead to papers
> and to a PhD thesis, and there is only so much that one person can do.
> 
> The debugger is a separate module from the rest of CDT/Photran. My
> graduate students have all shyed away from it because it was not
> related to their research.  There were three undergrad who worked on
> it last year and discovered a number of ways to improve it.
> Unfortunately, the work they did will need to be redone to work with
> the latest version of the CDT.  Jeff is going to make a version of
> Photran based on the older CDT that will include their work, so you
> can see a better debugger.  But what we'd REALLY like is for someone
> out there to take responsibility for the debugger and focus on making
> it useful.  What we call "the debugger" is really just a Java shell
> around gdb.  gdb does almost all the work, and it doesn't need to be
> changed.  However, the Java shell needs to be changed a little, as the
> student's project showed.
> 
> I am teaching a software engineering course this semester, and using
> Eclipse and Photran in it.  There are going to be about a hundred
> students, divided into groups of four or five, who will be adding
> features to Photran.  I don't expect that many of the projects will be
> good enough that we will want to take their code, but I could be
> wrong.  In any case, a lot of students will learn the design of
> Eclipse, CDT and Photran, so they will be able to do more serious work
> on it.  I'll try to get some of them to work on it next semester, and
> they will be more likely to make a contribution then.
> 
> One of the handicaps we face is that the people in my group are not
> Fortran programmers.  So, we don't use Photran on a daily basis.  We
> need to find out what needs to be improved if we are going to put our
> effort in the right direction.
> 
> A lot of students in my class are looking for projects to improve the
> GUI of Photran.  What are some things that could make it a much better
> Fortran editor?
> 
> -Ralph Johnson
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