RECOUP—maintaining Fortran

Abstract

The RECOUP Project is investigating ways of making old Fortran code more intelligible. In particular, such code is likely to be very unstructured and to have inadequate documentation. We are attempting to solve both these problems.The two groups working on this project are approaching the problem from different angles with a view to meeting in the middle. On the one hand, current Fortran restructuring tools are being investigated and extended with a view to extracting abstract data types buried in the code. On the other hand, an executable subset of Z has been identified which will form the basis of the documentation notation. The intention is that old Fortran code should be restructured and documented in Z [Spivey, 1992], so that proposed updates to the code and to its documentation can be kept in step.