A GRAPH-THEORETIC PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses a programming language for graph theory, which is an extension of FORTRAN for handling graphs. The graph-theoretic programming language (GTPL) is described as a dialect of FORTRAN, and for simplicity basic FORTRAN has been used. The assignment statement of GTPL is exactly like that of FORTRAN, although this version of the assignment statement may appear somewhat restrictive, it has proved quite adequate for the purpose for which the language has been designed. In addition to the IF statement of FORTRAN, there is a logical IF statement which is used when testing for certain graph-theoretic properties. An interesting feature of GTPL is the facility to handle collections of graphs. The label that identifies a collection of graphs is prefixed by the character $, and one may refer to the entire collection of graphs or to a particular member of the collection. However, the most important difference between GTPL and FORTRAN lies in the incorporation in GTPL of a number of graph-theoretical statements. The operating system for the programming language consists of a compiler phase and an execution phase. An attempt has been made to include a wide variety of graph theory routines in GTPL, but it is expected that use of the language will point to the need for additional routines.