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Experience with FORTRAN VERIFIER

A tool for documentation and error diagnosis of FORTRAN-77 programs

  • VIII — Validation
  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
ESEC '87 (ESEC 1987)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 289))

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Abstract

FORTRAN VERIFIER (FORTVER) is a tool to assist the development, testing and maintenance of large FORTRAN-77 programs. FORTVER will check module interfaces, and produce various documentation and cross-references. It will compute interprocedural, flow-insensitive sideeffects with complete static and dynamic aliasing in order to diagnose unused, unevaluated, unassigned, or otherwise illegally used variables. An improvement of Banning's algorithm for REF-parameter aliases is also introduced.

FORTVER has analyzed 50 production programs with 1.5 M lines of code, including 3 programs of 300 K lines each. FORTVER routinely diagnoses one serious error per 500–1000 lines at a cost of $20 per error, and can analyze 10–100 times bigger programs than the capacity of similar test tools. Results from four analyzed programs are reported and discussed.

FORTVER has recently been expanded with the FV/QE query editor, using data dictionary functions to assist programming-in-the-large. These tools are being integrated into the EPOS programming environment through the EPOS-DB system database. (EPOS means "Expert System for Program and System Development".)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Computer Science, Norwegian Institute of Technology, N-7034, Trondheim-NTH, Norway

    Reidar Conradi

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  1. Reidar Conradi
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Howard Nichols Dan Simpson

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© 1987 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Conradi, R. (1987). Experience with FORTRAN VERIFIER. In: Nichols, H., Simpson, D. (eds) ESEC '87. ESEC 1987. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 289. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022119

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022119

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-18712-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48117-1

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