19970811						    -*-text-*-

g77 libU77
----------

This directory contains an implementation of most of the `traditional'
Unix libU77 routines, mostly an interface to libc and libm routines
and some extra ones for time and date etc.  It's intended for use with
g77, to whose configuration procedure it's currently tied, but should
be compatible with f2c otherwise, if using the same f2c.h.

The contents of libU77 and its interfaces aren't consistent across
implementations.  This one is mostly taken from documentation for (an
old version of) the Convex implementation and the v2 SunPro one.
As of g77 version 0.5.20, most of these routines have been made
into g77 intrinsics.  Some routines have a version with a name prefixed
by `vxt', corresponding to the VMS Fortran versions, and these should
be integrated with g77's intrinsics visibility control.

A few routines are currently missing; in the case of `fork', for
instance, because they're probably not useful, and in the case of
`qsort' and those for stream-based i/o handling, because they need
more effort/research.  The configuration should weed out those few
which correspond to facilities which may not be present on some Unix
systems, such as symbolic links.  It's unclear whether the interfaces
to the native library random number routines should be retained, since
their implementation is likely to be something one should avoid
assiduously.

This library has been tested it under SunOS4.1.3 and Irix5.2 and there
has been some feedback from Linux; presumably potential problems lie
mainly with systems with impoverished native C library support which
haven't been properly taken care of with autoconf.

There's another GPL'd implementation of this stuff which I only found
out about recently (despite having looked) and I haven't yet checked
how they should be amalgamated.

Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>  Aug '95
(minor changes by Craig Burley <burley@gnu.org> Aug '97)
