Ratfiv
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ratfiv is an enhanced version of the Ratfor programming language, a preprocessor for Fortran designed to give it C-like capabilities. Fortran was widely used for scientific programming but had very basic control-flow primitives ("do" and "goto") and no "macro" facility which limited its expressiveness.
The name of the language is a pun (Ratfor (RATional FORtran) -> "Rat Four" -> "Rat Five" -> RatFiv), in the best of hacker's traditions.
Ratfiv was developed by Wikipedia editor Bill Wood (WPWoodJr) at the Institute for Cancer Research, Philadelphia, PA in the early 80's and released on several DECUS (Digital Equipment Users Group) SIG (Special Interest Group) tapes. It is based on the original Ratfor by B. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, with rewrites and enhancements by David Hanson and friends (U. of Arizona), Joe Sventek and Debbie Scherrer (Lawrence Berkely Laboratory).
Ratfiv V2.1 was distributed on the DECUS RSX82a SIG tape and is archived here. In the "Readme.1st" file, Ratfiv is described:
Ratfiv is a structured Fortran preprocessor providing
SWITCH, IF - ELSE, WHILE, FOR, DO, REPEAT - UNTIL, STRING,
and BREAK and NEXT constructs. Also supported are INCLUDE
files, DEFINE for symbolic constants and macros with
arguments, conditional compilation, formats in read, write,
encode, and decode statements, use of >, <, etc. instead of
.GT., .LT., etc, and the RETURN VALUE construct in
functions.
Ratfiv was developed from the Ratfor compiler
distributed by Lawrence Berkley Labs; versions are
available for VAX VMS and RSX/IAS systems. The major
enhancements in Ratfiv are:
1. Ability to specify a format statement inside READ,
WRITE, ENCODE, and DECODE statements;
2. Consistent line continuation using the underline
character;
3. Production of properly indented upper case Fortran
code with comments passed through;
4. Optional output of Fortran 77 code with the /F77
switch (however this switch produces valid code for
VAX Fortran 77 only);
5. Addition of a /SYMBOLS switch to the command line
to optionally read the SYMBOLS file;
6. Output of quoted strings or optionally hollerith
strings (quoted string output allows Ratfiv to be
used with DEC Fortran OPEN statements, the Fortran
77 CHARACTER data type, etc.);
7. Evaluated and unevaluated arguments in macros;
8. Correct line number reporting;
9. Exit with error status if an error occurs during
compilation;
10. Use of character constants in case labels;
11. Numerous bug fixes;
12. Comprehensive documentation;
13. Ratfiv keywords need not appear at the beginning of
a source line in order to be recognized.
