ENHANCING FORTRAN TO AID MANIPULATION OF LARGE STRUCTURED MATRICES

Presentation of suggested means for enhancing (ANS) FORTRAN in order to accommodate the needs of operations research analysts in programming tasks involving large, structured or sparse matrices. Such needs frequently arise in connection with large-scale optimization problems. Most of the text deals with fundamental concepts and descriptions of syntax, but related data structures are also treated. Proposed new capabilities include exploitation of repeated values among matrix entries, space-saving ″quasi-dynamic storage allocation″ , and easy set-up for construction of large matrices from smaller ones (with the actual construction deferable until and if the need arises).