The History of FORTRAN I, II and III

This article discusses attitudes about "automatic programming," the economics of programming, and existing programming systems, all in the early 1950s. It describes the formation of the FORTRAN group, its knowledge of existing systems, its plans for FORTRAN, and the development of the language in 1954. It describes the development of the optimizing compiler for FORTRAN I, of various language manuals, and of FORTRAN II and III. It concludes with remarks about later developments and the impact of FORTRAN and its successors on programming today.     

A high-level debugger for PL/I,Fortran and Basic

Dartmouth College has implemented a single debugger for several languages sharing a common runtime environment: PL/I, Basic and Fortran. The debugger is fairly powerful; users set breakpoints and traces which occur whenever the values of given variables change, or whenever certain relational expressions become true, for example. All debugging is carried on in a syntax similar to that of a high-level language. This debugger was implemented in about a month. It should be fairly easy to implement on most timesharing systems. This paper describes the debugger's user interface and gives a rough sketch of its implementation.     

The regeneration of Fortran software

There is a substantial body of existing Fortran software that has considerable scientific and commercial value, but whose potential is sometimes difficult to exploit to the full because of a lack of structure and internal documentation. This article discusses, by means of an example, how the OLYMPUS COMPOSITOR can be used to regenerate such software semi-automatically so that it meets improved documentation standards. Comments and headings can be edited in on-line, using a free format, and the COMPOSITOR then produces a clear standard layout in which the Fortran statement numbers are correlated with the decimally numbered sections and subsections of an individual routine, and the meaning of the code is clarified by appropriate indentation and cross-referencing. Using the OLYMPUS GENERATOR one can also restructure the COMMON blocks and construct indexes of variables. It is suggested that such techniques can materially enhance the usefulness of a great deal of Fortran software, including some of the programs already included in the CPC Program Library.     

The advantages of Fortran 90

Fortran 77 is the most widely used language for scientific programming. Its long-awaited revision is now called Fortran 90. It was finalized (down to the last editorial detail) on 11 April 1991, published as an ISO Standard in August 1991, and the first compiler is now on the market. This seems an appropriate moment to review its history and explain its advantages.     

The Interval-Enhanced GNU Fortran Compiler

Compiler support for intervals as intrinsic data types is essential for promoting the development and wide-spread use of interval software. It also plays an important role in encouraging the development of hardware support for interval arithmetic. This paper describes modifications made to the GNU Fortran Compiler to provide support for interval arithmetic. These modifications are based on a recently proposed Fortran 77 Interval Arithmetic Specification, which provides a standard for supporting interval arithmetic in Fortran. This paper also describes the design of the compiler's interval runtime libraries and the methodology used to test the compiler. The compiler and runtime libraries are designed to be portable to platforms that support the IEEE 754 floating point standard.     

A Comparison of Co-Array Fortran and OpenMP Fortran for SPMD Programming

Co-Array Fortran, formally called F^––, is a small set of extensions to Fortran 90/95 for Single-Program-Multiple-Data (SPMD) parallel processing. OpenMP Fortran is a set of compiler directives that provide a high level interface to threads in Fortran, with both thread-local and thread-shared memory. OpenMP is primarily designed for loop-level directive-based parallelization, but it can also be used for SPMD programs by spawning multiple threads as soon as the program starts and having each thread then execute the same code independently for the duration of the run. The similarities and differences between these two SPMD programming models are described.Co-Array Fortran can be implemented using either threads or processes, and is therefore applicable to a wider range of machine types than OpenMP Fortran. It has also been designed from the ground up to support the SPMD programming style. To simplify the implementation of Co-Array Fortran, a formal Subset is introduced that allows the mapping of co-arrays onto standard Fortran arrays of higher rank. An OpenMP Fortran compiler can be extended to support Subset Co-Array Fortran with relatively little effort.     

A comparison of Cobol, Fortran, PL-I and Spitbol

Spitbol, the compiler version of the symbol manipulation language Snobol 4, is compared with the well-known higher-level languages of Cobol, Fortran and PL-I. An algorithm for searching and insertion into a binary tree was chosen for a comparison standard and programmed in each language. Development and computer costs were then compared for the four languages. Although a single comparison does not prove one language superior to another, this comparison does suggest that Spitbol should at least be considered when choosing a programming language for non-numeric applications.     

UNIX的Pascal, Fortran 77, Ratfor

<正> 第一节 伯克利Pascal 如已叙述过的那样,UNIX的主要语言是C语言,但UNIX中还能使用Pascal、Fortran77、Ratfor和Lisp等其它程序语言。其中,Lisp语言将在下一章介绍,本章考虑用Pascal、Fortran 77和Ratfor语言写出具有大致相同功能的程序并想想各语言处理系统的特征(特     

Unfinished history and paradoxes of quantum potential. I. Non-relativistic origin, history and paradoxes

This is the first of two related papers analyzing and explaining the origin, manifestations and parodoxical features of the quantum potential (QP) from the non-relativistic and relativistic points of view. The QP arises in the quantum Hamiltonian under various procedures of quantization of natural systems, i.e., those whose Hamilton functions are positive-definite quadratic forms in momenta with coefficients depending on the coordinates in (n-dimensional) configurational space V _n thus endowed with a Riemannian structure. The result of quantization may be considered as quantum mechanics (QM) of a particle in V _n in the normal Gaussian coordinate system in the globally static space-time V _1,n . Contradiction of the QP to the General Covariance and Equivalence principles is discussed. It is found that actually the historically first Hilbert space-based quantization by E. Schrödinger (1926), after revision in the modern framework of QM, also leads to a QP in the form that B. DeWitt found 26 years later. Efforts to avoid the QP or to reduce its drawbacks are discussed. The general conclusion is that some form of QP and a violation of the principles of general relativity which it induces are inevitable in the non-relativistic quantum Hamiltonian. It is also shown that Feynman (path-integral) quantization of natural systems singles out two versions of the QP, which both determine two bi-scalar (independent of a choice of coordinates) propagators fixing two different algorithms of path integral calculation. The accompanying paper under the same general title and the subtitle “The Relativistic Point of View” (published in the same issue of the journal and referred to as Paper II) considers a relation of the nonrelativistic QP to the quantum theory of a scalar field non-minimally coupled to the curved space-time metric.     

Fortran 90与面向对象程序设计

面向对象方法已经成一种最有前途的软件开发方法之一。面对对象程序设计方法应用于工程计算已有近十年,所采用的语言为Ｃ＋＋,Ｅｉｆｆｅｌ和Ｓｍａｌｌｔａｌｋ等。     

The programming language standards scene, ten years on Paper 5: Fortran

This paper, one of a simultaneously published set on ten years of activity in programming language standards describes the developments in standardization of the programming language Fortran which have taken place in the period 1983–1993.     

An experiment with Fortran and Pascal

This paper reports on a programming experiment involving the languages Fortran and Pascal. The subject of the experiment was the simulation of the X-ray department of a local hospital. The programming was carried out by two different programmers at different periods of time. A static analysis was performed on both models to determine how the languages were used by both programmers. The compilation and execution speeds of both models were then determined when executed on an ICL 1906S computer. The results indicate that the Pascal program is substantially faster in both compilation and execution speed than an equivalent Fortran program.     

Interprocedural Compilation of Fortran D

Fortran D is a version of Fortran extended with data decomposition specifications. It is designed to provide a machine-independent programming model for data-parallel applications and has heavily influenced the design of High Performance Fortran (HPF). In previous work we described Fortran D compilation algorithms for individual procedures. This paper presents an interprocedural approach to analyze data and computation partitions, optimize communication, support dynamic data decomposition, and perform other tasks required to compile Fortran D programs. Our algorithms are designed to make interprocedural compilation efficient. First, we collect summary information after edits to solve important data-flow problems in a separate interprocedural propagation phase. Second, for nonrecursive programs we compile procedures in reverse topological order to propagate additional interprocedural information during code generation. We thus limit compilation to a single pass over each procedure body. We also perform optimizations across procedure boundaries by delaying instantiation of the computation partition, communication, and dynamic data decomposition. Empirical results show that interprocedural optimization is crucial in achieving acceptable performance for a common application code.