R devel - Apr 2003 - Difference between .C and .Fortran (on Windows)

In updating my web page on using non-standard compilers in Windows,
I've been trying to figure out exactly what the differences are
between .C() and .Fortran(), but the code is pretty convoluted. 

Can someone let me know if the following is correct?

There are two differences between .C("foo", ...) and
.Fortran("foo").

 1.  .C looks for the symbol "foo" in the external library, whereas
.Fortran("foo", ...) looks for the symbol "foo_" (which is
how g77
would export the subroutine "foo").

 2.  .C passes character mode vectors as a pointer to an array of
pointers to the strings, whereas .Fortran just passes a pointer to a
255 character buffer containing the first string.  In both cases the
strings are null-terminated.

Are there other differences?  Are these platform-dependent?

Duncan Murdoch

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
>
> Are there other differences?  Are these platform-dependent?
>
You can pass arbitrary language objects to .C  but not to .Fortran.

	-thomas

On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
> In updating my web page on using non-standard compilers in Windows,
> I've been trying to figure out exactly what the differences are
> between .C() and .Fortran(), but the code is pretty convoluted. 
> 
> Can someone let me know if the following is correct?
> 
> There are two differences between .C("foo", ...) and
.Fortran("foo").
> 
>  1.  .C looks for the symbol "foo" in the external library,
whereas
> .Fortran("foo", ...) looks for the symbol "foo_" (which
is how g77
> would export the subroutine "foo").
There are symbol.C() and symbol.For() to show you the mappings used.
Not all systems appends an underscore for Fortran, and some
case-convert the Fortran names (to lower, usually but not always).
R does not currently cope with the latter, so there is an assumption
that Fortran symbol names are written in lower case.  (That precludes
some Fortran compilers.)

I don't think do_symbol is convoluted, BTW!
>  2.  .C passes character mode vectors as a pointer to an array of
> pointers to the strings, whereas .Fortran just passes a pointer to a
> 255 character buffer containing the first string.  In both cases the
> strings are null-terminated.
> 
> Are there other differences?  Are these platform-dependent?
As Thomas noted, arbitrary language objects can be passed through .C.
Also, .Fortran does analogous things on returned strings (which may not be 
null-terminated, BTW).

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595