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On Saturday 07 May 2011, Peter Williams wrote:
> I'm working on wrapping a large, preexisting piece of Fortran code with
> an Autotools-based build system. The code is written in Fortran 90 and
> uses ".for" for the file extension. Unfortunately, automake ...
>
I assume you are using automake 1.11.1, right?

> ... thinks that ".for" files are Fortran 77 code, so the wrong compiler
> gets used and chokes on the F90 constructs.
> 
> It's not practical for me to rename the files -- tracking upstream would
> become impossible. Would it be possible to provide a way for me to tell
> automake that my .for files are actually Fortran 90, not Fortran 77? As
> far as I can tell, this mapping is simply hardcoded in /usr/bin/automake.
>
You're right.

> It wouldn't be the most pleasant, but it'd suffice
> if there were some global variable that I could set that would say "hey,
> Automake, .for files are F90". One could imagine more generic solutions
> as well, but Fortran is probably the only language that has these kinds
> of problems.
>
Please try the attached patch (against the v1.11.1 tag in the automake git
repository).  I *think* it should solve your problem for what concerns
automake.  However, note that the GNU Fortran Compiler will still consider
`*.for' files to be Fortran 77 by default, so you'll have to instruct it
to explicitly assume free-form Fortran 90 input, with .e.g.:

  $ ./configure FCFLAGS='-ffree-form -x f95' LDFLAGS='-x none'

This solution is probably not the best one, and is certainly not pretty,
but it should work.  If you can come up with a more general one, I'd be
happy to hear about it.

> Thanks,
> 
> Peter
> 

HTH,
  Stefano