Free Fortran compiler for PowerPC Mac?

A friend of mine has an old PowerPC Mac and would like to get a free
Fortran compiler for it. Any advice from someone out there with the
same setup as to what compiler(s) will work for this?

James Tursa

In article <57pab419etqll7m38tb7tr5vv4b2d2a07e@4ax.com>,
James Tursa <aclassyguywithaknotac@hotmail.com> wrote:

> A friend of mine has an old PowerPC Mac and would like to get a free
> Fortran compiler for it. Any advice from someone out there with the
> same setup as to what compiler(s) will work for this?

You can install some of the recent versions of gcc/gfortran on OSX
10.4.x and 10.5.x using the fink package manager. 10.5.x does not
work (at least without hacking) on some older PPC Macs (I think you
need a G4 or G5 processor at least 1GHz). As of a couple of months
ago, fink dropped support for OSX 10.3.x, but at least some versions
of gcc/gfortran do work correctly on these older OS versions. So
the answer depends a little on how old is the hardware and OS
software that you need to use gfortran on.

You can also install gcc/gfortran directly without a package
manager, so this may give you some more options regarding PPC
hardware and OSX versions. I think the compilers run also on Mac
PPC hardware running Linux, but I don't have experience with this.

The IBM xlf compiler was supported on older PPC Mac hardware. You
might be able to find the compiler on ebay or something for cheap,
if perhaps not free, but it is no longer supported, it required some
hacking on OSX 10.4.x, and it does not run at all (as far as I know)
on 10.5.x. If you want to use 64-bit addressing, then the IBM
compiler is not an option at all. For some reason, IBM never
supported that in their compilers even though the Mac hardware and
software was 64-bit capable at that time, and they did support
64-bit addressing on their own IBM hardware (under both AIX and
Linux I think).

If you are asking about compilers running under MacOS 7, 8 or 9,
then although there were several commercial compilers available
(Absoft and Language Systems, among others) I don't know of any free
compilers. You might still be able to find these for cheap on ebay
or something, but I much prefer code development under OSX than
these older OS versions. MPW was capable, but it is not as full and
rich as the unix development environment provided by OSX.

$.02 -Ron Shepard