Design characteristics of the WATFOR compiler

Abstract

About 1960, it became fashionable to introduce computer techniques into many of the courses being taught at the university level. These courses tended to be technically oriented (Engineering, Science, Mathematics), and the language most often used was one of the versions of FORTRAN. Students were introduced to computing by a brief course in FORTRAN, and then were expected to apply their newly-discovered knowledge to the solution of numerous problems related to some discipline. Introducing large numbers of students to computing in this manner created an entirely new type of demand for computer services. These new demands for computer services had to satisfy the following needs. (i) The programmers were not professionals; thus, the proportion of errors in a given number of written statements was higher than usual. (ii) The programs themselves were often quite short, usually 30 to 50 statements in length. (iii) The volume of submitted programs was very high, in the order of hundreds of thousands per day. (iv) The debugged program tended to be run in production only once, and was set aside as a completed assignment.