Bugs and Shortcomings

Flint has a number of bugs and shortcomings, in addition to those described above. Flint is intended to be run on a FORTRAN that a compiler would accept. During the early stages of program development, a good FORTRAN compiler is a far better tool to find programming problems. Flint bugs and shortcomings include:

• IMPLICIT statements are ignored.
• EQUIVALENCE statements are rcudely treated.
• A number of archaic, poor or non-standard FORTRAN features are not recognized. These include the ASSIGN statement and assigned GOTO, alternate return statements, PAUSE, ENTRY, DECODE, ENCODE, many archaic forms of i/o statements, NAMELIST and many VMS extensions.
• While BYTE, INTEGER*2, INTEGER*4, REAL*4, REAL*8, etc statements are recognized, a warning message is generated, Flint otherwise treats these variables as either standard INTEGERs or REALs.
• Columns 72 to 80 of an input line (if they are present) are assumed to be part of the FORTRAN statement, rather than a comment field. Flint generates a warning if a line contains more than 72 characters.

Flint recognizes the following extensions, and digests them without complaint:

• DO/ENDDO and DOWHILE/ENDDO constructs.
• INCLUDE statements.
• Lower case characters are considered equivalent to upper case. Tabs are treated as if they were the equivalent number of spaces. The full printable ascii character set can appear in character strings.
• A comment line starting with the hash character (#).
• The INTENT statement (see the section on Interface Definition Libraries).