Re: [photran] mature project, complex makefile

[Ralph Johnson <johnson@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Photran works best if you write your own makefile instead of using the
ones it generates.  When it compiles your program, it just runs "make"
in the current directory.  So, it can handle custom makefiles and
there is no reason to write a special makefile just for Eclipse.
Moreover, Photran works with CDT, so you should be able to mix Fortan
and C, though i don't think we handle cross-references between
languages well.  We'd love to get a good case study that can help us
to improve our cross-language capabilities.

The bigger problem is conditional compilation.  Photran doesn't handle
conditional compilation very well.  We are in the process of building
CPP support, at which time this problem will go away.  However, at the
moment, Photran will often think that your file is syntatically
incorrect and miss cross-references and refuse to refactor parts of
your code.  You can still edit the files and can run the compiler on
them, but you will lose the capabilities that require Photran to use
its own parser.

You do NOT have to integrate your project with Eclipse.  Photran works
with make, so you do not have to change that part.  However, I am not
sure whether it is better than vim yet.  It is certainly our goal to
make it so.  Try it out and tell us what you think.  If there are some
small things that would make it more valuable to you , please let us
know.

-Ralph Johnson