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Supported Platforms

The title of this part is a misnomer. It could have been better called Platforms where we know this works. gnuplotfortran (and fortranposix) is known to work on the following platform / compiler combinations :

A Microsoft Windows port ?

A few words are in order regarding a possible MS Windows port :

Please do not request a MS Windows port. I neither use MS Windows, nor do I own a MS Windows infected machine (and never will, if you get my drift). If you are interested in working on a MS Windows port (or have somehow managed to make it work with cygwin), please get in contact with me.

That out of the way, I believe that I should include some information that could help that poor fellow starting on a Windows port. Recently, I tried to get gnuplotfortran to work for a friend of mine1. I first found that Windows XP Home apparently does not support POSIX system calls. Then we downloaded something called Windows Services for Unix2. Then we discovered that it needed Windows XP Professional3 ! So, the upshot was that my friend would have needed to "upgrade" his windows computer so that he could use some functions that the sane part of the world takes for granted (all assuming that the package we downloaded included the functions we needed). This was a needless, but an expected headache (ok, my opinion of the MS products is a little jaded, in case you have not noticed). Then we looked at cygwin, which apparently does not have (I might be mistaken in this) popen and pclose functions (which gnuplotfortran depends on). Too much trouble all told. My friend then made the logical decision to shift his OS from Windows to Debian GNU Linux. I would like to flatter myself and think that gnuplotfortran brought one person over from the darkness of the Windows world, but the fact is that it was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.

Enough of this digression.


Footnotes

  1. Who is now an erstwhile Windows user.

  2. IMO, it should be named the other way round - but I guess the folks at Microsoft are unlikely to want to imply that Unix does something that their buggy OS does not.

  3. The implicit irony in that statement should be apparent to most people if they pause to think, slowly repeating that to themselves