Watcom and Lahey Fortran for netCDF in OS/2 2.1

>Organization: NASA/GSFC
>Keywords: 199405201850.AA01642 netCDF OS/2 2.1
>From: address@hidden

Keith,

I can't remember if I replied to your note already or not.  Sorry, it has
been quite hectic around here lately.

>We were recently at DOE's Atmospheric Radtaion Measurements Climate
>and Radiation Testbed site. The weather data that they collected and are
>going to let us use is in the NetCDF format.
>
>I'm looking to get hold of the software to run NetCDF on a IBM PC
>using OS/2 version 2.1. This is coimpletely different from version1.2.
>I have copied the netcdf-2.3.2pl2.tar.Z to my machine plus other
>files. It is not clear to me how to proceed.

Uncompress and untar the distribution and then proceed to the make stage.
I assume that you are running the HPFS for OS/2 2.1 since you did not
comment on the file names being longer than the 8.3 limitation of the FAT
file system.

>We would rather not use MS FORTRAN. We do have WATCOM FORTRAN, 9.0,
>and Lahey FORTRAN 5.0 (Lahey runs in DOS, 5.0). 

Unfortunately, we don't have any experience with these compilers here at
Unidata.

>I tried using the files in the MSDOS directory. Both ncdump and ncgen crashed. 

I just FTPed both NCDUMP.EXE and NCGEN.EXE to my Ambra 486 DX2 66 that is
running OS/2 2.1.  I had no problems using NCDUMP to list out the contents
of a netCDF file that I have on the machine (since these are DOS executables
you will probably have to run them in a DOS session to get the results that
you expect/need).  Are you sure you FTPed these in binary mode?

>I don't know what else to try.

It sounds like you will be wanting to do program development on your OS/2
2.1 system.  If this is the case, the DOS versions of NCDUMP.EXE and NCGEN.EXE
will not do you a lot of good.

>Could you give me some hints in how to proeed?

Well, this may be kind of hard.  First, you will have to get a C compiler
that is compatible with the Fortran compiler that you want to use (Watcom
sells 32-bit C and Fortran compilers for OS/2 2.x).  The next thing you 
have to do is to figure out the calling convention between C and Fortran
for the compilers you choose.  This gets especially tricky for passing
character arrays as compilers seem to have different ways of passing the 
length of strings.  Then the make files will need to be changed.  I am
sure that there are more things that need to be done, but I can't think
of them right now.

The easiest thing might be to send a request to the netcdf mail group
(address@hidden) to see if someone has already done what you
want.
--
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* Tom Yoksas                                             UCAR Unidata Program *
* (303) 497-8642 (last resort)                                  P.O. Box 3000 *
* address@hidden                                   Boulder, CO 80307 *
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