Extraction of Documentation from Fortran 90 Source Code: An Industrial Experience

Abstract

Software programs in scientific and engineering domains typically contain complex and extensive computations that are additionally optimized concerning running time or memory requirements. As a consequence, the actual computations are often hard to comprehend from the source code only. This paper presents tool support to extract documentation from source code that reveals the actual computation. We discuss how to generate the entire documentation from the source code automatically by using a minimum of additional annotations. This reduces the effort for writing documentation manually and ensures consistency between source code and documentation. Furthermore, the extracted documentation is given in a notation expected and comprehensible by domain experts. We applied our approach in the electrical engineering domain for software systems implemented in the Fortran 90 programming langugage.