Bug Response from Absoft


I mentioned a bug in the compiler in one of the previous notes about Absoft F77, see them here. I sent the bug report in on Thursday afternoon, and by Monday morning they had a diagnosis and a workaround. Here is their response:
There is a bug in the compiler when producing symbol table
information for nested structures. The bug is related
to two things:
	1. Source code ordering of declarations
	2. An attempt to keep debug file sizes small by only
	outputting symbol "type" information for symbols 
	that are actually used somewhere in the program.

More specifically:

[ note - they are describing here the conditions that must
be present in order to make the bug occur. -- JT ]

         structure /padpar1/  cor(NMAX_PD)
            record /dpaddle/ offset, amplitude
         end structure


	1. A structure definition must occur with a variable
	actually declared as part of the definition. In the
	example the array "cor" is the variable in question.

	2. The structure being defined must contain structures
	itself.  In this case variables "offset" and "amplitude".

That's it in a nutshell, but there are a couple of other things
that must occur as well. 

Anyway, there are two ways for you to proceed:

	1. Easiest: turn on "-N111" this will turn off the part
	of the compiler that tries to suppress output of useless
	type info. In this case, the compiler was a wee-bit too
	aggressive.

	2. Change your source code to fully define the structure
	type before declaring variables:

         structure /padpar1/ 
            record /dpaddle/ offset, amplitude
         end structure

	record /padpar1/ cor(NMAX_PD)
I am quite pleased at how quickly they have responded.