Masters Theses

Date of Award

8-1984

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Computer Science

Major Professor

Kevin C. O' Kane

Committee Members

Charles Pfleeger, David Straight

Abstract

Computer systems--combinations of hardware and software—have evolved from the mid-1960's to the present time as the type and population of user communities have grown. Systems have changed in nature from requiring special technical expertise for their use to being more readily available to less-sophisticated audiences: i.e., being "user friendly." An early and successful attempt at a user-friendly system is the MUMPS system, consisting of a programming language, a data base manager, and an interactive operating system. Part of this study is an investigation of the MUMPS system historically, including present-day implementations, how the sytem has changed to meet new requirements of computer systems, and what ways MUMPS might yet evolve and improve.

An implementation of a MUMPS system written in the high-level RT-11 FORTRAN dialect of FORTRAN 66 was developed by Dr. Kevin O'Kane and others at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 1980. As part of the thesis project, this implementation was translated into a FORTRAN 77 dialect to run on Data General Corporation ECLIPSE series hardware. The translation process is given, and the two implementations are contrasted and compared. Suggestions for the further improvement of this FORTRAN-based MUMPS interpreter are given.

The result of this project is a working MUMPS interpreter running in a different hardware and operating system environment from its predecessor. Setting aside dialectical differences between FORTRAN 66 and FORTRAN 77, the translation was not especially difficult. This shows the validity of using high-level languages for systems development purposes, which is one of the criteria for the original F0RTRAN-based MUMPS interpreter.

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