Ratfiv

Ratfiv is an enhanced version of the Ratfor programming language, a preprocessor for Fortran designed to give it C-like capabilities. Fortran was widely used for scientific programming but had very basic control-flow primitives ("do" and "goto") and no "macro" facility which limited its expressiveness.

The name of the language is a pun (Ratfor (RATional FORtran) -> "Rat Four" -> "Rat Five" -> RatFiv), in the best hacker traditions.

Ratfiv was developed by WPWoodJr at the Institute for Cancer Research, Philadelphia, PA in the early 80's and released on several DECUS (Digital Equipment Users Group) SIG (Special Interest Group) tapes. It is based on the original Ratfor by B. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, with rewrites and enhancements by David Hanson and friends (U. of Arizona), Joe Sventek and Debbie Scherrer (Lawrence Berkely Laboratory).

Ratfiv V2.1 was distributed on the DECUS RSX82a SIG tape and is archived here In the "Readme.1st" file, Ratfiv is described:

     Ratfiv is a structured Fortran  preprocessor  providing
SWITCH,  IF  - ELSE, WHILE, FOR, DO, REPEAT - UNTIL, STRING,
and BREAK and NEXT constructs.  Also supported  are  INCLUDE
files,   DEFINE  for  symbolic  constants  and  macros  with
arguments, conditional compilation, formats in read,  write,
encode, and decode statements, use of >, <, etc.  instead of
.GT.,  .LT.,  etc,  and  the  RETURN  VALUE   construct   in
functions.
     Ratfiv  was  developed   from   the   Ratfor   compiler
distributed   by   Lawrence   Berkley  Labs;   versions  are
available for  VAX  VMS  and  RSX/IAS  systems.   The  major
enhancements in Ratfiv are:
     1. Ability to specify a format statement inside  READ,
        WRITE, ENCODE, and DECODE statements;
     2. Consistent line continuation  using  the  underline
        character;
     3. Production of properly indented upper case  Fortran
        code with comments passed through;
     4. Optional output of Fortran 77 code  with  the  /F77
        switch (however this switch produces valid code for
        VAX Fortran 77 only);
     5. Addition of a /SYMBOLS switch to the  command  line
        to optionally read the SYMBOLS file;
     6. Output of quoted strings  or  optionally  hollerith
        strings  (quoted  string output allows Ratfiv to be
        used with DEC Fortran OPEN statements, the  Fortran
        77 CHARACTER data type, etc.);
     7. Evaluated and unevaluated arguments in macros;
     8. Correct line number reporting;
     9. Exit with error status if an  error  occurs  during
        compilation;
    10. Use of character constants in case labels;
    11. Numerous bug fixes;
    12. Comprehensive documentation;
    13. Ratfiv keywords need not appear at the beginning of
        a source line in order to be recognized.

See also

• Ratfor
• Fortran 77
• VAX/VMS