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)