[technology-pmc] RE: [photran] Global Variables

[Doug Schaefer <DSchaefer@xxxxxxx>]

In theory, being an Eclipse project, you should be open for any help you can
get from the Photran community. That way, the Photran project can grow to
more than one person, no?

We talk a lot about diversity in the Eclipse world, and only diverse
projects can succeed. I would love to see more participation from outside of
UIUC. Especially from commercial vendors who ship Fortran-based products and
other Eclipse projects that depend on Fortran. I hear a lot of people
talking about Fortran in the Eclipse context and wonder why they aren't
contributing to this project.

Doug Schaefer, QNX Software Systems
Eclipse CDT Project Lead, http://cdtdoug.blogspot.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: photran-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:photran-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Ralph Johnson
> Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 4:39 PM
> To: Photran Information
> Subject: Re: [photran] Global Variables
> 
> > Not clear to me where (free) Photran is going and the speed with which
> it
> > might get there...
> 
> 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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