SIParCS 2018- Francis "Frank" Duffy
Francis Duffy, Bridgewater State University
Fortran Standards Toolkit
The Fortran Standards Toolkit (FST) aims to provide an automated solution for modernizing Fortran programs that have accumulated non-standard and obsolete features. Adhering to standard programming practice is especially important for large scale programs. Scientific programs, such as increasingly comprehensive weather models, are a prime example. Programs like these become increasingly hard to work with when they are allowed to accumulate non-standard and obsolete features; they become more difficult to use and develop across time. Programs of this scale are often hundreds of thousands of lines long or more. Considering this, the absolute necessity for the development of general automated source-to-source translation tools becomes apparent. During the evolution of the project, we focused on laying the groundwork for an expandable set of source-to-source translation tools. With the time that we had, we were able to develop the first three tools for the set. They take input source code and modify it to follow modern standards, each one handling a specific issue. We developed an arithmetic-if translator, a type-star notation translator, and a non-blocked-do-loop translator. They are effective individually and in conjunction with one another on Fortran standards f90 and above. While they perform transformations on older standards properly, the resulting output is not guaranteed to be compliable. Often, there remains other non-standard constructs that are not currently handled by a tool in the set. These tools, among others, constitute the future work of the project.
Mentors: Dan Nagle, Davide Del Vento
Slides