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A large Fortran program has many authors and a lifetime of many years. Code is inherited from
other projects. Differences in style, in management and in the available programming tools lead
to the creation of a dusty deck. The indentations may no longer represent the control structures;
to find all the assignments of
'THETA'
you may need to search for
'THETA =', 'Theta=', 'theta=' ...
FPT makes maintenance of such code manageable.
FPT automatically reformats source code to a consistent set of standards requested by the user.
It deals with indentations, adds or removes spaces before and after tokens, checks line lengths,
allows specifications of upper or lower case keywords and variables. It changes the format of real
numbers, handles continuation lines, deals with the renumbering of statement labels and with many
other issues to make life easier for the Fortran programmer. It also contains a language sensitive
editor which allows Fortran identifiers to be renamed systematically. Each user works in his or
her own coding style, and the code is reformatted to a company standard before release.
The same reformatting features may also be used to make
code unmaintainable - to protect source code by removing the
comments and encrypting the variable names, making it unintelligible
to others. This has proved useful in situations where sensitive
code is handed over to third parties in a compilable form
(Please see Security).
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