FORTRAN/TK

General information

Welcome to the provisional homepage of the Open Source project FORTRAN/TK.
FORTRAN/TK is, an easy to learn, powerful cross-platform (OS/2 Warp and Windows 9x/NT) widget toolkit for the ​Open Watcom FORTRAN/77 compiler. Technically it's a kind of wrapper to ​Rexx/Tk by Roger O'Connor and Mark Hessling but it does not rely on a Rexx interpreter. Therefore it's the first FORTRAN implementation of the Tk-toolkit from ​Tcl/Tk so far. All Rexx/Tk functions are already usable from within FORTRAN/TK including some which are not even listed in the ​Rexx/Tk help. It also includes about 20 new functions, called FORTRAN/TK extensions, which are neither part of Tcl/Tk nor Rexx/Tk nor Open Watcom FORTRAN. They include functions for file management, file searching, basic support for dynamic DLL handling and the clipboard which are commonly needed to write sophisticated GUI applications.
FORTRAN/TK is one of the easiest and most comfortable ways to create graphical user interfaces using the FORTRAN programming language. It even implements features that are not really supported by the Open Watcom FORTRAN compiler at all like variable length argument lists, using some very dirty assembly hacks. Don't ask...
For more information, including dependencies, examples and build instructions, please refer to the readme.txt​. The ​presentation about FORTRAN/TK I held at the ​Developers Workshop 2005 in Dresden is also a good introduction, although it already contains outdated information.

FORTRAN/TK is licensed under the ​Open Software License v.2.1.

History

The history of all official FORTRAN/TK releases may be found in the history.txt​.

Screenshots

Releases

The various FORTRAN/TK releases are no real binary releases but more like source distributions. It must be compiled to a fortrantk.lib according to the build instructions. So each release is for OS/2 Warp and Windows 9x/NT. It is necessary to be able to compile FORTRAN/TK itself to compile a FORTRAN/TK program anyway. However the example programs are precompiled for both platforms and necessary runtime libraries are included so you can have a look at it first.

• ​FORTRAN/TK Version 0.6 Beta
• ​FORTRAN/TK Version 0.5 Beta
  FIX: One DLL-library is missing from the runtime-libraries of the OS/2 version to let it run properly. So you have to put it in the "examples\binos2\runtime" directory.
  Download it from ​here.
• ​FORTRAN/TK Version 0.1 Alpha

Applications using FORTRAN/TK

References

Currently there is no complete FORTRAN/TK documentation and guide but there are a number of files and homepages you should check out if you do want to write your own FORTRAN/TK programs.

• There's a short tutorial about how to write "Hello world" in FORTRAN/TK.
• As already mentioned, the readme.txt​ contains useful information.
• There's a presentation I held at the OS/2 Developers Workshop 2005.
  ​FORTRAN/TK: Easy GUI development for OS/2 and Windows
• There are FORTRAN/TK examples like a text editor, a calculator and a simple test program.
• The ​Canasta card-game Canabis is based on FORTRAN/TK, too.
• The FORTRAN/TK sourcecode.
  You can find information about already implemented extended FORTRAN/TK functions​ and about FORTRAN/TK extensions​.
• FORTRAN/TK is based on ​Rexx/Tk, so the ​Rexx/Tk API is very similar to the FORTRAN/TK one.
• For detailed information about the Tk-toolkit and its API, you should refer to the ​Tcl/Tk 8.0.5 manual.

Contact

If you have questions or opinions or if you want to contribute, feel free to ​send me an email.