Summary of the Ratfor language, an extended portable dialect called REP, its style and flavor, and details of its implementation on the PDP-10
Ratfor (RATional FORtran) is a dialect of Fortran that allows structured programming and the use of simple macros. It is the language of the Software Tools package, and is documented in the book Software Tools. It has proved significantly easier than Fortran to read, write, and understand. Although debugging is slightly harder in Ratfor than in Fortran, there is usually less of it to do, since Ratfor lends itself to better program design. Ratfor operates as a preprocessor to any existing Fortran system. It is relatively easy, using Ratfor, to write programs that are portable with little or no change to any environment that supports standard Fortran. REP (Ratfor Extended and Portable) is an extended version of Ratfor. It is fully upward compatible with the Addison-Wesley translator, though there are a few divergences from certain Unix and Software Tools User Group dialects. The principal feature of REP is its fully developed macro facility, a language within a language, capable of doing such things as creating new data types, data structuring, recursive procedures, and much more, portably, and in the spirit of Ratfor, but there are many other lesser though nevertheless important extensions.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley Lab., CA (USA)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-48
- OSTI ID:
- 5712392
- Report Number(s):
- LBL-13405; ON: DE82005136
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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