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An empirical study of FORTRAN programs
Abstract
A sample of programs, written in FORTRAN by a wide variety of people for a wide variety of applications, was chosen ‘at random’ in an attempt to discover quantitatively ‘what programmers really do’. Statistical results of this survey are presented here, together with some of their apparent implications for future work in compiler design. The principal conclusion which may be drawn is the importance of a program ‘profile’, namely a table of frequency counts which record how often each statement is performed in a typical run; there are strong indications that profile‐keeping should become a standard practice in all computer systems, for casual users as well as system programmers. This paper is the report of a three month study undertaken by the author and about a dozen students and representatives of the software industry during the summer of 1970. It is hoped that a reader who studies this report will obtain a fairly clear conception of how FORTRAN is being used, and what compilers can do about it.
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Cited by
The LINPACK Benchmark: past, present and future
Dongarra, J. J., Luszczek, P., & Petitet, A. (2003) · Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience · doi:10.1002/cpe.728 · Cited by 813
Towards a theory of the cognitive processes in computer programming
Brooks, R. (1977) · International Journal of Man-Machine Studies · doi:10.1016/s0020-7373(77)80039-4 · Cited by 222
Call graph profiling for multi agent systems
Doan Van Bien, D., Lillis, D., & Collier, R. W. (2010) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-13338-1_9 · Cited by 3
Metadata
- Authors
- Knuth, D. E.
- Venue
- Software: Practice and Experience
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 1971-04
- Volume
- 1
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 105-133
- ISSN
- 0038-0644 (ISSN-L)
- 1097-024X
- OpenAlex
- W2092492242
- Cited by
- 680
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 152.78
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An empirical study of FORTRAN programs. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1002/spe.4380010203
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- Knuth, D. E. (1971). An empirical study of FORTRAN programs. Software: Practice and Experience. https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.4380010203
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
