ABSTRACT
Legacy software represents a large investment for many organizations in the scientific community. The maintenance programmers, which keep these software systems operational are continually developing, modifying and updating code. In order to assist the maintenance programmer in understanding legacy software, it is desirable to have a software tool that can automate repetitive and computable tasks. Past research has often used the term “intelligent editor” to describe this function This research project takes this direction further, it attempts to build an expert system that is able to understand segments of legacy software. The field of Program Understanding attempts to determine the function of a code segment with or without programmer intervention. This research analyses FORTRAN numerical analysis programs for common algorithm usage and other software characteristics. This paper discusses the problems identified by a cursory analysis of FORTRAN programs from the Collected Algorithms of the ACM.
