A bird's-eye view of Fortran 95

Three major extensions have been added . . .

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by Jeanne Adams Fortran 95 is a modest upgrade to Fortran 90, which in itself represented major additions to the language while keeping all of Fortran 77. Fortran 95 provides many rewordings for clarity and a few new features that assist programming for High-Performance Fortran (HPF). The typos in Fortran 90 have been corrected. The three major extensions to Fortran 90 in Fortran 95 are : The FORALL statement and construct PURE and ELEMENTAL procedures Pointer initialization and structure default initialization Many compilers are available for Fortran 90 and Fortran 95, including those for a variety of small desktop machines and for larger systems; see "Compilers" in this issue. For more information on Fortran 90 and Fortran 95, see: http://www.fortran.com/fortran http://www.fortranlib.com/ A sneak peek at Fortran 2000 J3, the Fortran standards committee, is working on Fortran 2000, which is planned for release in the year 2002. If all goes as planned, one of the most significant additions in Fortran 2000 will be interoperability with the language C. Some new features to support object-oriented programming will also be important.

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