Ratfor

ratfor is a preprocessor for Fortran, written by Brian Kernighan and P. J. Plauger, who had worked on early Unix systems, at Bell Labs. Ratfor was one of the "software tools" described in their very influential 1976 book, Software tools.

The book describes how ordinary programmers could port versions of some of the core tools that made programming on a Unix system so productive. Each chapter discusses a single tool, and how an ordinary programmers could port it to their system -- so long as they had access to a Fortran compiler. The book contained source code, written in ratfor, and it contained source code for the ratfor preprocessor.

The ratfor preprocessor would read a program, written in a language that looked like the C language, and it would emit equivalent code, in Fortran. It included C-like flow-of-control, like C-like if - else, while and do-while.

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