Using the f2c Compiler

The widely available f2c program may be used to convert the fortran FITSIO source files into C code, which then may be processed by a C compiler. This avoids the need to have a Fortran compiler to build the FITSIO library. The fitsio.f file should process through f2c without any problems, but the machine-dependent version of FITSIO may have a few non-standard fortran statements which f2c will not understand. One such case is the use of the IDATE subroutine, or equivalent, to get the system date which is used in the ftgsdt subroutine. The easiest workaround to this problem is to simply comment out this call and then avoid calling the ftpdat subroutine, which is the only FITSIO subroutine to use this function.