An Empirical Study of Fortran Programs

Abstract

A sample of programs, written in FORTRAN by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of applications, was chosen 'at random' in an attempt to discover quantitatively 'what programmers really do.' Statistical results of this survey are presented here, together with some of their apparent implications for future work in compiler design. The principal conclusion which may be drawn is the importance of a program 'profile,' namely a table of frequency counts which record how often each statement is performed in a typical run; there are strong indications that profile-keeping should become a standard practice in all computer systems, for casual users as well as system programmers. The paper is the report of a three month study undertaken by the author and about a dozen students and representatives of the software industry during the summer 1970. It is hoped that a reader who studies the report will obtain a fairly clear conception of how FORTRAN is being used, and what compilers can do about it.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1970
Accession Number
AD0715513

Entities

People

  • Donald Knuth

Organizations

  • Stanford University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Assembly Languages
  • Compilers
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Construction
  • Corporations
  • Frequency
  • Instructions
  • Language
  • Linear Accelerators
  • Machine Languages
  • Maintenance Costs
  • Numerical Analysis
  • Software Development
  • Standards

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Science.
  • Technical Research and Report Writing.