Conference turris::fortran

   I scanned the OPEN3D conference for similar topics, but the replies
   indicated that there is no "Fortran binding" for OpenGL from Digital.
   A "Fortran binding" is an API that is specifically taylored for the
   Fortran language.

   One can always call the OpenGL routines directly from Fortran,
   but you would have to be aware of the differences in calling
   standards (e.g. C pass by value for scalars, Fortran pass by address),
   namespace issues (use of cdec$ alias can be used to solve this one
   easily), but you would still not have the symbolic constants
   and typedefs provided by the OpenGL header files.

   One possibility that someone else might be able to comment on:
   The new Digital Visual Fortran product for Intel says it has support
   for calling OpenGL. Could some of this support (I assume its in f90
   modules?) be brought over to Digital Unix?

   In short, calling OpenGL from Digital Fortran is possible,
   but we don't make it 'easy'.

   -- John Faricelli

The DIGITAL Visual Fortran kit for Windows 95/Windows NT includes OpenGL
examples and bindings, but I don't know if Fortran bindings exist for
UNIX - we don't provide them on our Fortran kit there.  I don't know if the
Windows bindings can be appropriately modified for use on UNIX.

					Steve

    thanks for the reply.
    
    We are fighting with SGI for this case.  IIT Being the best Technical
    University, we will be loosing a lot if we gett out of this account.
    
    Can you please tell me the availability of the "Forran binding" for 
    OpenGL from SGI/IBM ? I cud not get these info on the NET....
    
    thanks and regards
    
    Bhargavi
    
    

I'm not sure any of us know what IBM and SGI offer here.  I will see if I can
get one of the DVF examples to compile and link on UNIX (I have no idea how
to find the OpenGL libraries there, though...)

			Steve

   There appear to be f77 and f90 bindings to OpenGL and the OpenGL toolkit
   available at:

   http://math.nist.gov/f90gl/

   Note that these libraries are really interfaces to something called
   "Mesa", which is supposed to be "a 3D graphics library with an API
   which is very similar to that of OpenGL". I downloaded the bindings
   and the readme file indicates that in some cases, the bindings were
   linked with the vendor supplied OpenGL libraries. So I was encouraged
   to look further (I note that both SGI and IBM had makefiles which linked
   to native OpenGL).

   The readme file states:

   "This interface is based on the
    OpenGL FORTRAN Binding Proposal which can be obtained from
    http://www.sgi.com/Technology/openGL/fortran.html."

   I found the Digital OpenGL libraries on a neighbor's workstation,
   and was able to compile the bindings for fgl and fglut,
   but not "tk" (this is apparently some other toolkit than the
   "tk" in Tcl/Tk??).

   I don't know if this is enough, but it might be worthwhile looking at...

   -- John Faricelli

    thanks for the info.  I will try loading the same and test.
    
    regards
    bhargavi

   I found some version of this "tk" toolkit in the OpenGL
   programming examples provided on our kit. But there were still
   one or two undefined external references after I compiled it
   (so close yet so far!), so I could not generate a complete
   executable of the examples provided from the NIST.

   I poked around the SGI web site, and I found a "tk" package
   (the one related to OpenGL) in an unsupported software section,
   but it looked a bit old. I didn't have time to investigate further.

   You might have more time to investigate this.

   -- John Faricelli