On Sep 18, 4:13 pm, Arjen Markus wrote:

Well, daunting, daunting... Compiler construction as a (black) art is
overrated ;-)

You have to realize that not a single one of the gfortran developers
(current and past, including g95) have a computer science background.
At least, not as far as I know.

All gfortran developers are physicists, engineers, mathematicians,
etc., in their Real Life, just like most people that follow this
newsgroup. These developers started as Fortran users, with no more
knowledge of compiler construction than most people here.

If they can learn to develop a compiler, then, certainly, you can do
it too! All it takes is a willing brain and an itch to scratch, such
as some bug that prevents you from compiling your program with
gfortran.

To illustrate this, let me give an example: One of the most productive
developers of this moment was a Google Summer of Code student with
little (if any) knowledge about gcc/gfortran internals and development
processes. He only needed a couple of months to become a quite
proficient gfortran developer.

Tobias already said the rest...

Gr.
Steven