It is well known that extracting parallel loops plays a significant role in designing parallelizing compilers. The execution efficiency of a loop is enhanced when the loop can be executed in parallel or partial parallel, like a DOALL or DOACROSS loop. This paper reports on the practical parallelism detector (PPD) that is implemented in PFPC (a portable FORTRAN parallelizing compiler running on OSF/1) at NCTU to concentrate on finding the parallelism available in loops. The PPD can extract the potential DOALL and DOACROSS loops in a program by invoking a combination of the ZIV test and the I test for verifying array subscripts. Furthermore, if DOACROSS loops are available, an optimization of synchronization statement is made. Experimental results show that PPD is more reliable and accurate than previous approaches.