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Record Id 29779
Title The new features of Fortran 2000
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Abstract The aim of this paper is to summarize the new features in the draft Fortran 2000 standard (J3 2002). We have taken as our starting point Fortran 95 plus the two official extensions (Cohen 2001, Reid 20010 that have been pulished as Type 2 technical reports. These provide features for 1. Allocatable dummy arguments and type components, and 2. Support for the five exceptions of the IEEE floating point standard (IEEE 1989) and for other features of this Standard. There is a firm commitment to include the features of these TRs in Fortran 2000, apart from changes that follow from errors and omissions found during implementation. Therefore, these features are not open to comment and are not described here. For an informal description, see chapters 12 and 13 of Metcalf and Reid (1999). Fortran 2000 is a major extension of Fortran 95. This contrasts with Fortran 95, which was a minor extension of Fortran 90. Beside the two TR items, the major changes concern object orientation and interfacing with C. Allocatable arrays are very important for optimization - after all, good execution speed is Fortran's forte. Exception handling is needed to write robust code. Object orientation provides an effective way to separate programming into independent tasks and to build upon existing codes; we describe these features in Section 2. Interfacing with C is needed for access to all the hardware features and to allow C programmers to call efficient Fortran codes; we describe these features in Section 5. There are also many less major enhancements, described in Sections 3 and 4. This is not an official document and has not been approved by either of the Fortran committees WG5 or J3. The official draft is available via the web at ftp://ftp.j3-fortran.org/j3/doc/standing/2002/02-007r3/
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Language English (EN)
Type Details URI(s) Local file(s) Year
Report RAL Technical Reports RAL-TR-2002-030. 2003. raltr-2002030.pdf 2003