SPAG – Questions and Answers

Shouldn’t I just bin this old stuff and start from scratch?

It’s tempting to wash your hands of legacy code, but programs have content as well as form. Old Fortran programs may look awful, and seem impossible to understand, but there is often real treasure buried in them, in the form of algorithms, data, and information of all sorts.

Don’t just throw it away – recondition it! With plusFORT, and a little effort you can rewrite your program to modern standards in a fraction of the time you would have needed for a rewrite.

What happens to comments when the code is restructured?

Comments are presumed to be attached to the statement that follows them, and as the code is restructured, are moved around in the same way as that statement. F95 style end-of-line comments, are an exception, and are attached to the statement with which they share a line. Another exception is comments preceding statements which are removed from the program (e.g. CONTINUE or GOTO statements which are not needed in the unscrambled code). These are attached to the statement following the redundant statement. The net result is that SPAG preserves comments and usually puts them in the right place.

Are there limits on the size of program that can be processed by SPAG?

Not really. You can process any number of subprograms, and each could have many thousands of statements. plusFORT has been used on numerous projects involving millions of lines of code..

Does SPAGged code run slower?

With few exceptions, SPAG does not change the way in which computation is done, but only the way in which control is passed between one computational section of code and another. As a result, there should be little or no change to either the size or speed of the object code when a program is unscrambled.

Can SPAG handle non-standard Extensions to the ISO standard?

Yes. SPAG understands Fortran 95, and much of Fortran 2003 and 2008. It also deals with most proprietary extensions. including VAX Fortran, IBM VS Fortran, Cray pointers, ENCODE/DECODE etc.

How does SPAG restructure spaghetti code?

SPAG transforms spaghetti code by the cumulative effect of thousands of “elemental” operations. These are small changes which improve the structure of the code, but leave the meaning unchanged. An important advantage of this approach is that major changes to program structure are brought about by a small number of relatively simple and thoroughly reliable procedures. Look at the example below: the apparently small change between the initial and final states is in fact the result of five elemental operations.

SPAG elemental operators – A Worked Example

    IF ( A.GT.B ) GOTO 10
    R1 = 2.0
    CALL SUB
 10 PRINT * , R1

    IF ( A.GT.B ) THEN
       GOTO 10
    ELSE
       GOTO xx
    ENDIF
 xx R1 = 2.0
    CALL SUB
 10 PRINT * , R1

    IF ( A.GT.B ) THEN
       GOTO 10
    ELSE
       R1 = 2.0
       CALL SUB
       GOTO 10
    ENDIF
 10 PRINT * , R1

    IF ( A.GT.B ) THEN
    ELSE
       R1 = 2.0
       CALL SUB
    ENDIF
    GOTO 10
 10 PRINT * , R1

    IF ( A.GT.B ) THEN
    ELSE
       R1 = 2.0
       CALL SUB
    ENDIF
    PRINT * , R1

    IF ( a.LE.b ) THEN
      r1 = 2.0
      CALL sub
   ENDIF
   PRINT * , r1

Does it just amount to removing all GOTOs?

Of course, there is more to producing readable code than just eliminating GOTOs. Pascal and C programmers know that too much nesting can make programs almost as obscure as too little. SPAG has elemental operators which allow it to reduce nesting by use of the ELSEIF statement. Look at the example below:

Example of Indentation Reduction

    IF ( z.NE.'ONE' ) THEN
       IF ( z.NE.'TWO' ) THEN
          IF ( z.NE.'THREE' ) THEN
             IF ( z.EQ.'FOUR' ) THEN
                x = a(4)
             ENDIF
          ELSE
             x = a(3)
          ENDIF
       ELSE
          x = a(2)
       ENDIF
    ELSE
       x = a(1)
    ENDIF

    IF ( z.EQ.'ONE' ) THEN
       x = a(1)
    ELSEIF ( z.EQ.'TWO' ) THEN
       x = a(2)
    ELSEIF ( z.EQ.'THREE' ) THEN
       x = a(3)
    ELSEIF ( z.EQ.'FOUR' ) THEN
       x= a(4)
    ENDIF

Can I be absolutely sure that SPAG will not change the logic of my program?

SPAG is now a mature program. Since it was first released in 1986, SPAG has successfully unscrambled billions of lines of spaghetti Fortran, and it does its job without fuss or incident.

The way SPAG works – by the repeated application of simple operators – makes it inherently robust.

In fact SPAG provides a way to REDUCE the risk which inevitably goes with change. Using SPAG is certainly orders of magnitude safer than changing your code by hand.