Standards and Proposals of Industrial Real-time Fortran

Abstract

The paper deals with real-time languages which remain strictly within the syntactical frame of FORTRAN i.e. all operations necessary for industrial real-time applications in addition to FORTRAN are realized by FORTRAN procedures. Firstly the main features of the following American papers are described: (1) ISA S61.1 (1972), Standard, (2) ISA S61.2(1973, Draft Standard, (3) ISA S61.1 (1976), Standard, (4) ISA S61.2 (1977), Draft No. 2 Standard, (5) S 61.3 (1978), Draft Proposal. Secondly comments are given on the German paper (6) VDI/VDE Guidelines 3556 “Prozess-FORTRAN 75”. This paper has been developed in 1974 and 1975. It is based on important parts of (1) and (2) yet on contrary to these papers it defines a complete real-time language with restricted but powerful features for programming real-time operations. Thirdly the recent European paper (7) Industrial Real-Time FORTRAN of the Purdue Europe TCI is explained. This paper is an expansion of “Prozess-FORTRAN 75” taking into regard the progress in the field of real-time operating systems since 1975. The main aspects regarded in the development of this paper have been:(a) Ease of implementation by using only real-time features available in modern real-time operating systems, (b) Ease of learning and application by a limited number of procedures (less than 50), performing simple and clear operations, (c) Programming security (cl) for the real-time operations by giving the user a restricted power to influence foreign parallel activities but a complete control of all CALLs by means of associated failure parameters and (c2) for file handling by offering the user protection mechanisms which guarantee the integrity of his files. The paper “Industrial Real-Time FORTRAN” shall become a recommendation of Purdue Europe TC 1 for future implementation.