Abstract
There is plenty happening just now with respect to Fortran.
Two sets of features (for exception handling and for enhancements to allocatable arrays) were defined in Technical Reports as extensions to Fortran 95 and have become widely available in compilers.
The Fortran 2003 Standard has been approved and is about to be published. As well as adding the contents of the two Technical Reports, this adds interoperability with C, parameterized derived types, procedure pointers, type extension and polymorphism, access to the computing environment, support of international character sets, and many other enhancements.
A new Technical Report has also been approved and is about to be published. This enhances the module features and avoids the ‘compilation cascade’ that can mar the development of very large programs. It is written as an extension of Fortran 2003, but is expected to be widely implemented as an extension to Fortran 95 compilers.
We will summarize all these developments, which will make Fortran even more suitable for large numerically-demanding applications.
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References
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Reid, J.: The future of Fortran. Computing in Science and Engineering 5(4), 59–67 (2003)
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Reid, J.K. (2006). Fortran Is Getting More and More Powerful. In: Dongarra, J., Madsen, K., Waśniewski, J. (eds) Applied Parallel Computing. State of the Art in Scientific Computing. PARA 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3732. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11558958_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11558958_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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