VERY IMPORTANT: gfortran issues

[arango]

Recently, there have been a few messages about compiling ROMS with gfortran. Many users have different versions of this compiler: ancient and recent ones. Remember that gfortran is a free downloadable compiler, so you get what you pay for it. Thus, it is advantageous to have a pay-for compiler option to avoid frustrations with some of the newer features of the 2003/2008 standard, parallel random number generators used in Lagrangian trajectory (FLOATS) and 4D-Var algorithms, numerical precision, efficiency, and so on.

I am not a big fan of gfortran because the debugging objects do not have the rich information needed in the TotalView Debugger. Most of my TotalView debugging is done with ifort.

Now, there is an issue with the exquisite, compact, and valid statement in the yaml_parser.F:

    nkeys=COUNT((/ (Kstring(i:i), i=1,Lstr) /) == CHAR(46)) + 1

I fixed that problem by creating the new function yaml_CounterKey to execute such a statement in gfortran successfully:

    nkeys=yaml_CountKeys(Kstring, CHAR(46))

Here is an excellent example of how we have to change code to account for gfortran deficiencies. Luckily, I can control such changes even if the code is less compact.