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.