gabriel@anl-mcs.ARPA (John Gabriel) (04/28/86)
Here is a little more information about TOOLPACK. For more details mail cowell@anl-mcs.arpa. TOOLPACK is an application of the "pack" (Eispack, Linpack, Minpack...) paradigm to the question of a general purpose "Extended SCCSS" for those who have only a FORTRAN compiler, and some rather arbitrary O/S environment. It comprises a set of tools for developing, managing, and testing large FORTRAN programs or Application Libaries in environments not having the UNIX tools. Typical tools in the package are:- A Precision Transformer. This is a special case of some more general tools for program transformation, I think this one simply converts single precision to double precision and vice versa. The underlying paradigm is to build a parse tree for the input, match various patterns against sub trees, and apply rewriting rules when the patterns match. Static Analysis Tools, e.g. type checking across subroutine calls, call trees etc. Dynamic Analysis Tools, the analogoue of the UNIX profile tools. Polish, a Pretty Printer. A Standardiser for Declarations. The system originated as a collaborative effort including Argonne MCS division, universities, and I think NAG. For the full history enquire of cowell loc. cit. A major point to be made about the system is that its basis is FORTRAN as the "Universal Assembler", i.e. everybody (on mainframes) has a FORTRAN, and many of the physics/engineering/numerical analysis community did not, and still do not have a UNIX environment. This is especially true outside the USA, and is more true than we often realise of engineers and physicists here. A pupose of TOOLPACK was to explore what could be done in FORTRAN along the lines of the Software Tools to help developers of large numerical software systems gain productivity. John Gabriel (gabriel@anl-mcs.arpa) Mathematics & Computer Science Division Argonne National Laboratory 9700S. Cass Ave. Argonne, IL 60439 (312) 972-7240