1 what is the linker job in FORTRAN programming language 2 A

1- what is the linker job in FORTRAN programming language?

2- And how is it different from other linkers like the ones for C or C++ ?

Solution

PART 1:

FORTRAN is a complied form of language. It means that the source code must be firstly converted into machine code. This output is in binary form and is called an object file. Then the machine code along with the subroutines or functions should be merged into an executable file. This process is called linking.

Linker has one very important task, it is used to resolve the references to the functions and the subroutines from many different object files. Hence the job of te linker is to create a single executable file from different object files. By having compilation and linking as two different processes, the complexity of the code is decreased.

This also helps in the case when we have a large project. We need not go through the whole compilation step everytime we do changes. Rather, we only need to compile those source files whch have changed and for the remaining the object files are sufficient for the linker.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PART 2:

The names of the entry point for the FORTRAN compilers have an appended underscore with the name.

For eg: Test _temp_

Here, temp is the name of the routine and ghas an underscore appended to it.

Usually the name of the routine is in lowercase in te object files, but there is a possibility that the name might occur in uppercase too.