Re: Fortran to Ada converter?

[rlivings@together.net (Joe's Garage)]

> Does anyone know of a fortran to ada converter?
> Any help is appreciated. Please reply by e-mail.
> Thanks.
> Tim

In 1991, I was contracting with GE Astro in Princeton.  They had a lot
of heritage FORTRAN simulation software to integrate with a new Ada
sim.  They sent me to the GE CR&D facility in Schenectady, NY to check
out a FORTRAN to Ada conversion utility.  It was called ENCORE, which
stood for ENvironment for COde REengineering.  It was not complete at
the time, but it worked fairly well.  Ran on a Sun SPARC station.  At
the time, it worked OK with Sun FORTRAN, except that it didn't know
what to do with EQUIVILANCE statements, etc...  I tossed some VAX
FORTRAN at it and pretty much stopped it in its tracks when it saw all
of the DEC extensions.  They may have worked some of that out by now,
or they may have shelved the project - I just don't know.

Since FORTRAN comes in so many flavors, such problems will plague any
such tool.  Another arguement for a single, non extensible language
standard such as Ada!

Good luck!

Bob Livingston

PS - We ended up translating some of it by hand, and using pragma
INTERFACE for the rest.

PPS - I think GE still owns CR&D - I don't think they sold it to
Martin