Mariano Méndez (one of our Photran committers and the proprietor of
http://www.fortranrefactoring.com.ar/) and his PhD advisor, Fernando
Tinetti, published a nice article in this month's ACM Fortran Forum
on their work modernizing legacy Fortran codes through automated
refactoring. The article describes an interesting vision, as well
as some detail on how (and why) they are implementing their
transformations in Photran. -Jeff
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2179280.2179281
================
"Fortran Legacy Software: Source Code Update and Possible
Parallelisation Issues"
Fernando G. Tinetti and Mariano Méndez, Universidad Nacional de La
Plata
Abstract: We are working on a process for carrying out a set of
transformations on Fortran legacy projects. We started our work for
parallelization and reduction of runtime at least on multiprocessing
systems, but we found necessary to update several old Fortran
features and/or legacy software issues as a previous task. We
present how to define and implement several source code
transformations in order to enhance readability and, also, provide a
source code that we think is more likely to be parallelized in
subsequent work. Furthermore, we propose that some parallelization
(e.g. for shared memory parallel computers) can be made at least as
a tool-guided process, i.e. as other source code transformations. In
the most simple cases, some transformations from sequential to
parallel processing could be made automatically by a source code
software analysis and transformation tool, which could provide the
user (programmer/developer) a suggested way of Parallelisation.
Source code transformations are initially approached as
restructurings, and implemented by changing the abstract syntax tree
(AST) program representation. We provide some comments on our
preliminary work on the source code transformations directly
focussed on parallelization that we expect to implement almost
automatically.
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