About Version 2.24

Simply Fortran version 2.24 has now been available for about one and a half months, and version 2.25 has not yet appeared. Some of our more seasoned users might consider this delay a little longer than normal between official releases, but development certainly hasn’t been static. The latest build (1921) of version 2.24 was released just two days ago. We thought it might be prudent to explain some of the changes in these builds and what other development might be taking place.

Bugs and Various Fixes

A bug existed in the syntax checking engine that cause the syntax engine to fail for users with special characters in their user name on Windows. Anything from a space to a non-ASCII character would cause syntax checking to fail.

The Fortran indexing engine was failing on code containing line continuations where a comma was the last character on a given line. This bug actually arose in recent versions due to improvements and bug fixes for other Fortran-related parsing enhancements and issues.

Simply Fortran was attempting to compile Fortran include files ending with the .INC extension as standalone source files. The previous solution was to disable the files in the Project Outline, but Simply Fortran now treats these files properly.

AppGraphics was not able to draw vertical text. A fix is now present, but a user has already reported some minor drawing problems with some fonts. This existing bug will probably necessitate another build of version 2.24.

Some of the makefile generation code could intermittently cause error dialogs to appear. The most likely culprit was the handling of search directories for include and library files. The underlying code was greatly simplified for more robust handling of these directory flags.

An odd issue was causing Simply Fortran to lock up entirely. A new user reported that, when entering Fortran code that contained a comma on the very first line of an editor tab without said comma being preceded by an opening parentheses or a comment character, Simply Fortran would freeze. This scenario wouldn’t be common because most Fortran files would either begin with comments or a subprogram declaration (which would have an opening parentheses). The lockup was caused by an infinite loop as the calltip engine searched the line for either an opening parentheses or a newline character. On the very first line in the editor, it would encounter neither as it continued requesting characters at negative document positions. This extremely specific bug has now been fixed.

Developments

Simply Fortran version 2.24 has a reasonably robust feature set, which explains why a new version has yet to be created. However, version 2.25 should appear within the next month or so. We plan on including a new version of the underlying compiler and providing an improved automatic code formatter for “beautifying” existing Fortran.

We’ve also been working on some new developments. The screenshot below might be of particular interest to our users running Simply Fortran under WINE:

No official announcements concerning the above…