Interprocedural analyses (IPA) are becoming more and more common in co
mmercial compilers. But research on the analysis of Fortran programs i
s still going on, as a number of problems are not yet satisfactorily s
olved and others are emerging with new language dialects. This paper p
resents a survey of the main interprocedural analysis techniques, with
an emphasis on the suitability of the analysis framework for the char
acteristics of the original semantic problem. Our experience with the
PIPS interprocedural compiler workbench is then described. PIPS includ
es a make-like mechanism, PipsMake, which takes care of the interleavi
ngs between top-down and bottom-up analyses and allows a quid; prototy
ping of new interprocedural analyses. Intensive summarization is used
to reduce storage requirements and achieve reasonable analysis times w
hen dealing with real-life applications. The speed/accuracy tradeoffs
made for PIPS are discussed in the light of other interprocedural tool
s. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.