Abstract Parametric Fortran is an extension of Fortran that supports the definition of Fortran program templates by allowing the parameterization of arbitrary Fortran constructs. A Fortran program template can be translated into a regular Fortran program guided by values for the parameters. This paper describes the design, implementation, and applications of Parametric Fortran. Parametric Fortran is particularly useful in scientific computing. The applications include the definition of generic functions, removing duplicated code, and automatic differentiation. The described techniques have been successfully employed in a project that implements a generic inverse ocean modeling system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Parametric Fortran is an extension of Fortran that supports the construction of generic programs by allowing the parameterization of arbitrary Fortran constructs. A parameterized Fortran program can be translated into a regular Fortran program guided by values for the parameters. This paper describes the extensions of Parametric Fortran by two new language features, accessors and list parameters. These features particularly address the code duplication problem, which is a major problem in the context of scientific computing. The described techniques have been successfully employed in a project that implements a generic inverse ocean modeling system.

We present a program-generation approach to address a software-reuse challenge in the area of scientific computing. More specifically, we describe the design of a program generator for the specification of subroutines that can be generic in the dimensions of arrays, parameter lists, and called subroutines. We describe the application of that approach to a real-world problem in scientific computing which requires the generic description of inverse ocean modeling tools. In addition to a compiler that can transform generic specifications into efficient Fortran code for models, we have also developed a type system that can identify possible errors already in the specifications. This type system is important for the acceptance of the program generator among scientists because it prevents a large class of errors in the generated code.