Software Quality Assurance for Fortran 90 - A Survey of Available Tools

This report provides a survey of some of the software tools currently available to assist in the development of Fortran programs using the new 1990 and 1995 standards. A few tools also address the development of High Performance Fortran (HPF). This report is particularly concerned with tools which will enhance the quality of software developed. We have not looked at tools which focus on the high level design and requirements analysis, since these are often common to many languages. Instead we have concentrated on tools that help in the detection of programming errors and highlight poor practice, such as “spaghetti” style coding. At present, there appear to be few such tools available for the new Fortran standard. However, many Fortran 90 compilers can provide quite extensive compile and run time checks and some examples of these are also discussed.