ASIS:Good practice

Here is an article about good coding. You can easily find many more. The main point is that by spending a little extra time during development adopting a pragmatic programming approach one can greatly reduce the amount of time one has to spend later on trying to debug or expand the code in the future.

Linux vs MS Windows
'' RG comments: More will follow here after we at Bristol have discussed this further (probably late June or July 2008).

Some members of the group use a development environment on windows for their fortran programming. This environment includes a debugger. It also interrogates the code to establish dependancies, so a seperate makefile is not required. I think it uses only the ifort compiler.

Some members use Linux. This requires a little more effort on the part of the developer. The developer has to write their own makefile. Emacs is probably the text editor of choice. It supports the user as far as compilation debugging, but not for runtime debugging. Debugging can be done using ddd, but ddd does not work smoothly for all compilers. It probably works better with g95 and gfortran. We have had problems trying to use it with ifort. ''

General guidelines
RG: We could put down a couple of guidelines specific to this project. Note the purpose of this wiki is not to provide detailed generic good coding practice guidelines, such things can be found elsewhere. But perhaps we should define which compilers we want code to run with, and advocate implementation of simple test scripts. I (and possibly Gethin) can help with this.

RG to add links to some of Gethins pages.