A FORTRAN IV to QuickBASIC translator

Abstract

This paper describes the design and implementation of an automatic translator from standard FORTRAN IV to QuickBASIC, a structured form of the programming language BASIC. The translator makes two passes on the input program before finally generating the translated program. The converter not only performs lexical, syntactic and limited forms of semantic analyses on the source program, but it also recovers from any errors encountered. It was implemented using the C programming language in the Disk Operating System (DOS) environment and was successfully ported to UNIX. Furthermore, the contingencies to cope with other dialects of the source language have been defined, and the problems encountered in the implementation process are discussed.