Re: Shopping for a Compiler Project Idea

>Craig Burley, author of the GNU Fortran (77) compiler estimated
>recently that writing up the _design_ for GNU Fortran 9x would require
>*him* a year of work.


The time required for a Fortran 95 compiler depends very much on the
level of expertise of the developer, and subsidiary goals. The minimum
time required is about one man year's full time effort, based on
Malcolm Cohen's development of the first Fortran 90 compiler. However
Malcom is a remarkable man, had already spent a number of years
developing Fortran 77 code analysis tools (no compilers), was deeply
involved in developing the Fortran 90 standard, used C as an
intermediate language, did not implement any extensions, and did not
have optimization as an important priority for his first
implementation.


It might be possible to do something faster than Malcom if the
programmer uses some of the publically available Fortran 90/95
parsers/semantic analyzer's as a starting point, and Fortran itself as
a target language,see the links available from my web page


http://members.aol.com/wclodius


however the best documented of those tools requires the use of Eli,
and Eli (particularly for a project of the complexity of Fortran 95)
has a very significant learning curve. I suspect someone working full
time on learning Eli would be up to speed in three to six months,
still not a course project.


William B. Clodius

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