An empirical study of FORTRAN programs

TLDR

The study aims to quantify how FORTRAN programmers actually write code and to provide insights into FORTRAN usage that can inform compiler design. The authors conducted a three‑month survey of randomly selected FORTRAN programs from diverse users in summer 1970. The survey shows that profiling statement frequencies is crucial, suggesting that compiler design should adopt standard profile‑keeping for all systems.

Abstract

Abstract A sample of programs, written in FORTRAN by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of applications, was chosen ‘at random’ in an attempt to discover quantitatively ‘what programmers really do’. Statistical results of this survey are presented here, together with some of their apparent implications for future work in compiler design. The principal conclusion which may be drawn is the importance of a program ‘profile’, namely a table of frequency counts which record how often each statement is performed in a typical run; there are strong indications that profile‐keeping should become a standard practice in all computer systems, for casual users as well as system programmers. This paper is the report of a three month study undertaken by the author and about a dozen students and representatives of the software industry during the summer of 1970. It is hoped that a reader who studies this report will obtain a fairly clear conception of how FORTRAN is being used, and what compilers can do about it.