I have some comments on the Fortran code in the fseries package in file 4A-GarchModelling.f , especially the subroutine GARCHFIT and function DSNORM. I appended the code to the end of an earlier message, but it was rejected by some rule. Let me first say that I am grateful that packages for financial econometrics exist in R.
Fortran 77 had PARAMETERs, and PARAMETERs equal to 99999 and 200 should have been defined instead of repeatedly using "magic numbers". More importantly, the code will fail if NN exceeds 99999, but the code does not check for this. I hope someone will fix this. In the code dsged the variables half, one, two should be made parameters, and instead of IMPLICIT DOUBLE PRECISION (A-H, O-Z) IMPLICIT NONE should be used and all variables declared. Although IMPLICIT NONE is not standard Fortran 77, it is standard Fortran 90 and is supported by g77. Experienced Fortranners know that IMPLICIT NONE catches errors. Another defect is the use of specific intrinsic functions such as DSQRT. There is no need to use this, since the SQRT function is generic, handling both single and double precision arguments. Maybe there should R coding standards to address such issues. I hope that eventually the Fortran code in R will use the modern features of Fortran 90 and later standards, using the gfortran compiler. However, with a little effort one can still write clean code in Fortran 77 that also conforms to later standards. Vivek Rao ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel