fpt: Standardisation of Fortran Codes

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A large Fortran program has many authors and a lifetime of many years. Code is inherited from other projects. Differences in style, in management and in the available programming tools lead to the creation of a dusty deck. The indentations may no longer represent the control structures; to find all the assignments of THETA you may need to search for "THETA =", "Theta=", "theta=" ...

fpt makes maintenance of such code manageable.

A Consistent Format

fpt automatically reformats source code to a consistent set of standards requested by the user. You may specify, for example:

Free or fixed format
The line length
Depth of indentations for control constructs and derived type declarations
Spacing rules between tokens
The upper/lower/camel case spelling of symbols, keywords and operators
Symbolic or text format for relational operators
Dot or percent as type component separators

See the Reference Manual pages for Code Formatting.

Standardisation of Names

fpt contains a language sensitive editor which allows Fortran identifiers to be renamed systematically without changing keywords.

Construct and Declaration Handling

Standards can be imposed on declarations and control constructs. For example, see the commands

WRITE CONSTRUCT NAMES IN END STATEMENTS (Derived types, sub-programs ...)
SPECIFY NUMERIC SIZES and SPECIFY NUMERIC KINDS
WRITE KIND EQUAL IN DECLARATIONS
CHANGE DO CONTINUE TO DO ENDDO
REMOVE LABELS FROM ENDDO STATEMENTS
CHANGE PERCENT TO DOT or CHANGE DOT TO PERCENT in type component specifications
REMOVE ALL FORMAT STATEMENTS or those used less than a specified number of times

Fortitude - An Important Tool

Fortitude is a Fortran linter which reports deviations from standard practices and in many cases makes corrections. There is some overlap between the standardisation rules in Fortitude and those available in fpt, but there are also significant differences. Users are strongly recommended to try it.