The Shape of Code

I have been looking at doing some dimensional analysis of the Climategate code and so needed a Fortran parser.

The last time I used Fortran in anger the modern compilers were claiming conformance to the 1977 standard and since then we have had Fortran 90 (with a minor revision in 95) and Fortran 03. I decided to take the opportunity to learn something about the new features by writing a Fortran parser that did not require a symbol table.

The Eli project had a Fortran 90 grammar that was close to having a form acceptable to bison and a few hours editing and debugging got me a grammar containing 6 shift/reduce conflicts and 1 reduce/reduce conflict. These conflicts looked like they could all be handled using glr parsing. The grammar contained 922 productions, somewhat large, but I was only interested in actively making use of parts of it.

For my lexer I planned to cut and paste an existing C/C++/Java lexer I have used for many projects. Now this sounds like a fundamental mistake, these languages treat whitespace as being significant while Fortran does not. This important difference is illustrated by the well known situation where a Fortran lexer needs to lookahead in the character stream to decide whether the next token is the keyword do or the identifier do5i (if 1 is followed by a comma it must be a keyword):

      do 5 i = 1 , 10
      do 5 i = 1 . 10        ! assign 1.10 to do5i
5     continue

In my experience developers don’t break up literals or identifier names with whitespace, and so I planned to mostly ignore the whitespace issue (it would simplify things if some adjacent keywords were merged to create a single keyword).

In Fortran the I/O is specified in the language syntax, while in C like languages it is a runtime library call involving a string whose contents are interpreted at runtime. I decided to ignore I/O statements by skipping to the end of line (Fortran is line oriented).

Then the number of keywords hit me, around 190. Even with the simplifications, I had made writing a Fortran lexer look like it would be a lot of work; some of the keywords only had this status when followed by a = and I kept uncovering new issues. Cutting and pasting somebody else’s lexer would probably also involve a lot of work.

I went back and looked at some of the Fortran front ends I had found on the Internet. The GNU Fortran front-end was a huge beast and would need serious cutting back to be of use. moware was written in Fortran and used the traditional six character abbreviated names seen in ‘old-style’ Fortran source and not a lot of commenting. The Eli project seemed a lot more interested in the formalism side of things, and Fortran was just one of the languages they claimed to support.

The Open Fortran Parser looked very interesting. It was designed to be used as a parsing skeleton that could be used to produce tools that processed source, and already contained hooks that output diagnostic output when each language production was reduced during a parse. Tests showed that it did a good job of parsing the source I had, although there was one vendor extension used quite often (and not documented in their manual). The tool source, in Java, looked straightforward to follow, and it was obvious where my code needed to be added. This tool was exactly what I needed 🙂