Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!cbnewsm!mhgya!cdm
From: cdm@mhgya.att.com (45266-mclaughlin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Scope of intrinsics
Message-ID: <2847@cbnewsm.ATT.COM>
Date: 16 Aug 89 09:35:20 GMT
References: <1989Aug8.232014.9265@agate.berkeley.edu> <603@mbph.UUCP> <1397@bnlux0.bnl.gov>
Sender: nntp@cbnewsm.ATT.COM
Reply-To: cdm@mhgya.ATT.COM (45266-mclaughlin, charles d)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ
Lines: 20

Actually, the PFORT verifier was written by Andy Hall, not Stu Feldman.  It
grew out of a need to build a portable version of Altran (a language for
manipulating symbolic algebraic expressions).  It does not check for
conformance to Fortran-66, but rather to a subset thereof that was empirically
determined to be portable across a wide variety of compilers (fourteen, as I
remember).

As was pointed out in this group recently, there are no real guarantees that
the existence of a standard and standard-conforming compilers will insure
portability.  There still may be ways to write non-portable, standard-conform-
ing code.  For that reason, the PFORT approach was to use the compiler itself
as the definition of the language for any given machine and look for a common
subset of compiler-accepted constructs that produced the same results on the
class of machines of interest.  So far as I know, no one has taken that
approach to develop a comparable verifier for Fortran-77.

C. D. (Dick) McLaughlin
AT&T Bell Laboratories				att!mhpo!cdm (UUCP)
600 Mountain Avenue - Room 2F-223		cdm@mhpo.att.com (INTERNET)
Murray Hill, NJ 07974				attbl!c_d_mclaughlin (ATTMAIL)