Profiling and debugging in modern programming languages

Abstract

The conventional high level programming languages being used in physics, most notably FORTRAN, combine a high degree of insecurity with a lack of tools. With more modern languages, like Pascal or Ada, a toolset is quite often supplied for the development and analysis of programs. Most useful are a traceback- and a symbolic dump facility, cross-reference generators, either at the level of separate variables, or at the level of procedures and functions, and a source code (symbolic) debugger for the dynamic analysis of errors. A “profiler” for the generation of statement frequencies serves in the process of program optimization.