ratfor90

“Ratfor” is a dialect of Fortran that is more concise than raw Fortran. The newest Ratfor “compiler”, ratfor90 is a simple preprocesor program written in Perl that inputs an attractive Fortran-like dialect and outputs Fortran90. Mainly, the preprocessor produces Fortran statements like ” end do ”, “end if”, “end program”, and “end module”, from the Ratfor ”}”. Ratfor source is about 25-30% smaller than the equivalent Fortran making it equivalently more readable.

Bare-bones Fortran is our most universal computer language for computational physics. For general programming, however, it has been surpassed by C. Ratfor is Fortran with C-like syntax. Ratfor was invented by the people who invented C. After inventing C, they realized that they had made a mistake (too many semicolons) and they fixed it in Ratfor, although it was too late for C. Otherwise, Ratfor uses C-like syntax, the syntax that is also found in the popular languages C++ and Java .

At SEP we supplemented Ratfor77 by preprocessors to give Fortran77 the ability to allocate memory on the fly. These abilities are built into Fortran90 and are seamlessly included in Ratfor90. To take advantage of Fortran90's new features while maintaining the concise coding style provided by Ratfor required us to write a new Ratfor preprocessor, Ratfor90, which produces Fortran90, rather than Fortran77 code."

http://sepwww.stanford.edu/doku.php?id=sep:software:ratfor90