Report Number: CS-TR-67-79
Institution: Stanford University, Department of Computer Science
Title: 360 O.S. FORTRAN IV free field input/output subroutine package
Author: Doran, Robert W.
Date: October 1967
Abstract: Programmers dealing with aspects of natural language processing have a difficult task in choosing a computer language which enables them to program easily, produce efficient code and accept as data freely written sentences with words of arbitrary length. List processing languages such as LISP are reasonably easy to program in but do not execute very quickly. Other, formula oriented, languages like FORTRAN are not provided with free field input. The Computational Linguistics group at the Stanford University Computer Science Department is writing a system for testing transformational grammars. As these grammars are generally large and complicated, it is important to make the system as efficient as possible, so we are using FORTRAN IV (O.S. on IBM 360-65) as our language. To enable us to handle free field input we have developed a subroutine package which we describe here in the hope that it will be useful to others embarking on natural language tasks. The package consists of two main programs, free field reader, free field writer, with a number of utility routines and constant COMMON blocks.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/67/79/CS-TR-67-79.pdf