The translation of high-level computer languages to other high-level languages

This thesis is an investigation into the extent to which the language, FORTRAN, can be converted automatically to Pascal. Much has been written and said about the advantages of a "structured" language but there seems to be some reluctance for the computing community, as a whole, to adopt a structured language. A large amount of investigative work has been carried out by other workers into the possibility of extending FORTRAN to include some of the concepts of structured programming and other people have begun projects to convert FORTRAN to other structured languages but this is the first known attempt to convert FORTRAN to Pascal. The process adopted is not simply one of literally replacing FORTRAN by Pascal. Rather, an attempt is made to introduce the structured concepts of Pascal to the FORTRAN program. This involves replacing FORTRAN loops by the Pascal statements repeat ... until or while ... do, using the powerful Pascal if statement, and laying out the COMMON and EQUIVALENCE statements so that the structure is apparent. A clear, consistent layout procedure is adopted and the program structure in the Pascal listing produced is highlighted. FORTRAN subprograms are nested within the procedure which calls them, or declared global to the set of procedures which call them - an approach which eliminates the global subprogram declarations of FORTRAN