Efficiency Evaluation of a Translated FORTRAN77 TACTl Program to C++

This work investigates the efficiency of a reengineered object oriented C++ TACTl program versus its original which was written in the FORTRAN77 programming language. FORTRAN was dominant in scientific computing throughout the 20th century because of its high performance in numerical analysis, but most of the systems built during this period have been difficult to maintain and to integrate with modern software. We have translated the FORTRAN program using a conversion tool named F2C for the automated translation of the program to C++. The translated source code was further developed in an object-oriented approach and optimized using Eclipse C++ code optimization tools. Numerical experiments were conducted to investigate the computational efficiency in terms of speed and memory usage of the C++ version of the program and compared with the original source. Based on our experiment of translating the TACTl program to C++, legacy FORTRAN programs in scientific computing can be translated and structured to fully object oriented C++ programs and be as efficient as the original source program.