Related papers: A New face on old code

Fortran is the oldest high-level programming language that remains in use today and is one of the dominant languages used for compute-intensive scientific and engineering applications. However, Fortran has not kept up with the modern…

Far from the latest innovations in software development, many organizations still rely on old code written in "obsolete" programming languages. Because this source code is old and proven it often contributes significantly to the continuing…

A community of developers has formed to modernize the Fortran ecosystem. In this article, we describe the high-level features of Fortran that continue to make it a good choice for scientists and engineers in the 21st century. Ongoing…

The usefulness of generating random configurations is recognized in many areas of knowledge. Fortran was born for scientific computing and has been one of the main programming languages in this area since then. And several ongoing projects…

Since the introduction of the Fortran programming language some 60 years ago, there has been little progress in making error messages more user-friendly. A first step in this direction is to translate them into the natural language of the…

To fork a project is to copy the existing code base and move in a direction different than that of the erstwhile project leadership. Forking provides a rapid way to address new requirements by adapting an existing solution. However, it can…

Rapid technological progress in computer sciences finds solutions and at the same time creates ever more complex requirements. Due to an evolving complexity todays programming languages provide powerful frameworks which offer standard…

Twenty years ago, in an article titled "Covariance and contravariance: conflict without a cause", I argued that covariant and contravariant specialization of method parameters in object-oriented programming had different purposes and…

Although many active scientific codes use modern Fortran, most contemporary scientific software "libraries" are implemented in C and C++. Providing their numerical, algorithmic, or data management features to Fortran codes requires writing…

In computer programming languages, indentation formats program source code to improve readability. Programming languages make use of indentation to define program structure .Programmers use indentation to understand the structure of their…

The Fortran programming language continues to dominate the scientific computing community, with many production codes written in the outdated Fortran-77 dialect, yet with many non-standard extensions such as Cray poiters. This creates…

IRPF90 is a Fortran programming environment which helps the development of large Fortran codes. In Fortran programs, the programmer has to focus on the order of the instructions: before using a variable, the programmer has to be sure that…

Program comprehension is the most tedious and time consuming task of software maintenance, an important phase of the software life cycle. This is particularly true while maintaining scientific application programs that have been written in…

Deep learning models are widely used for solving challenging code processing tasks, such as code generation or code summarization. Traditionally, a specific model architecture was carefully built to solve a particular code processing task.…

Scientific computation is a discipline that combines numerical analysis, physical understanding, algorithm development, and structured programming. Several yottacycles per year on the world's largest computers are spent simulating problems…

With the great success of pre-trained models, the pretrain-then-finetune paradigm has been widely adopted on downstream tasks for source code understanding. However, compared to costly training a large-scale model from scratch, how to…

Software engineering is not an empirically based discipline. Consequently, many of its practices are based on little more than a generally agreed feeling that something may be true. Part of the problem is that it is both relatively young…

The nature of software re-engineering is to improve or transform existing software so it can be understood, controlled and reused as new software. Needs, the necessity of re-engineering software has greatly increased. The system software…

Requirements and code, in conventional software engineering wisdom, belong to entirely different worlds. Is it possible to unify these two worlds? A unified framework could help make software easier to change and reuse. To explore the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being leveraged for generating and translating scientific computer codes by both domain-experts and non-domain experts. Fortran has served as one of the go to programming languages in legacy…