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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Sow, Younoussa, Anquetil, Nicolas, Brault, Léandre, Ducasse, Stéphane
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21755
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author Sow, Younoussa
Anquetil, Nicolas
Brault, Léandre
Ducasse, Stéphane
author_facet Sow, Younoussa
Anquetil, Nicolas
Brault, Léandre
Ducasse, Stéphane
contents Legacy programming languages such as FORTRAN 77 still play a vital role in many industrial applications. Maintaining and modernizing these languages is challenging, especially when migrating to newer standards such as Fortran 2008. This is exacerbated in the presence of legacy proprietary extensions on such legacy languages, because their semantics are often based on old context (limits of legacy language, domain logic,...). This paper presents an approach for automatically migrating FORTRAN 77 with a proprietary extension, named Esope, to Fortran 2008. We introduce a tool that converts Esope source code to Fortran 2008. While supporting readability of the generated code, we want to maintain the level of abstraction provided by Esope. Our method uses model-driven engineering techniques, with transformations to generate a target model from which we export easy-to-read Fortran 2008 source code. We discuss the advantages, limitations, and maintainability considerations of our approach and provide insights into its scalability and adaptability to evolving requirements.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21755
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Migrating Esope to Fortran 2008 using model transformations
Sow, Younoussa
Anquetil, Nicolas
Brault, Léandre
Ducasse, Stéphane
Software Engineering
D.2.7
Legacy programming languages such as FORTRAN 77 still play a vital role in many industrial applications. Maintaining and modernizing these languages is challenging, especially when migrating to newer standards such as Fortran 2008. This is exacerbated in the presence of legacy proprietary extensions on such legacy languages, because their semantics are often based on old context (limits of legacy language, domain logic,...). This paper presents an approach for automatically migrating FORTRAN 77 with a proprietary extension, named Esope, to Fortran 2008. We introduce a tool that converts Esope source code to Fortran 2008. While supporting readability of the generated code, we want to maintain the level of abstraction provided by Esope. Our method uses model-driven engineering techniques, with transformations to generate a target model from which we export easy-to-read Fortran 2008 source code. We discuss the advantages, limitations, and maintainability considerations of our approach and provide insights into its scalability and adaptability to evolving requirements.
title Migrating Esope to Fortran 2008 using model transformations
topic Software Engineering
D.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21755