Implementing FORTRAN77 support in the GNU gdb debugger
Farooq Butt · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1995
Commercially available source-level debuggers in the Unix world often shortchange FORTRAN77 users. While C and C++ are usually well-supported languages, FORTRAN77 has not been given the attention it deserves. Given the current interest in performance-measurement via the popular SPEC benchmarks (many of which are coded in FORTRAN77) as well as the large installed-base of mathematical/scientific FORTRAN77 software, it is imperative for system software vendors to provide FORTRAN77 users with the same sort of fast, effective and powerful source-level debugging environment that C and C++ users enjoy. This paper details the addition of FORTRAN77 features to the GNU gdb[2] debugger in order to better support users of the highly-optimizing Motorola PowerPC 1 mf77 compiler. These FORTRAN77 features currently (as of version 4.10) only target the native PowerPC mf77 compiler distributed by Motorola.