Converting call-by-reference to call-by-value: Fortran and Lisp coexisting

ABSTRACT

Programs written in languages supporting call-by-reference continue to be of interest in functional programming circumstances where call-by-value is standard. In particular, if we can find a neat interface, by converting Fortran to Lisp we allow programmers to take advantage of an interactive functional symbolic system while running legacy numerical code. We show this can be done without unacceptable loss of efficiency. In building a combined symbolic-numeric environment such a conversion and combination may increase the synergy between the two approaches to scientific computing. This paper builds upon earlier reported work on f2cl.

REFERENCES

• 1: American National Standards Institute, Inc ANSI Common Lisp. We don't recommend obtaining it, but the official standard is available as ANSI X3.226-1994 from http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/product.asp?sku=ANSI+X3%2E226%2D1994. A more useful reference is Paul Graham: ANSI Common Lisp, Prentice Hall, 1995. There are also several on-line references, most notably http://www.lisp.org/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/ and http://www.franz.com/search/search-ansi-about.lhtml. These are almost universally used as resources for the language definition
• 2: American National Standards Institute, Inc ANSI X3.9-1978 ISO 1539-1980 (E) American National Standard Programming Language FORTRAN (1978)
• 3: K. A. Broughan , D. M. K. Willcock, Fortran to Lisp translation using f2cl, Software—Practice & Experience, v.26 n.10, p.1127-1139, Oct. 1996 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-024X(199610)26:10<1127::AID-SPE50>3.3.CO;2-H]
• 4: Common Lisp Open Code Collection. http://sourceforge.net/projects/clocc
• 5: David Bailey. A multiple precision package available at http://www.netlib.org/mpfun/
• 6: Kevin Rosenberg. http://uffi.med-info.com/ Lisp Universal Foreign Function Interface.
• 7: Guy L. Steele, Jr. and G.J. Sussman. "Lambda the Ultimate Imperative," http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html
• 8: Maxima computer algebra system http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Procedures, functions, and subroutines

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.6 Programming Environments
          Subjects: Interactive environments
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors
          Subjects: Compilers

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.1 SYMBOLIC AND ALGEBRAIC MANIPULATION
      I.1.3 Languages and Systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Languages, Performance

Keywords:
call, conversion, fortran, lisp