Fortran Wiki
CONSTANT attribute

Proposal: Support a CONSTANT attribute for non-modifiable data, or expand the use of PROTECTED to provide the same functionality.

A constant value can be represented by a PARAMETER, but you cant point to parameters. F2003/F2008 have a protected attribute which can provide a context-dependent constant attribute, which is similar to the way ‘const’ is used in C.

A pointer to constant data is probably the best example, It requires constant data to point to (i.e. a CONSTANT variable and not a parameter) and a way to indicate the writable status of pointee data in a dummy argument. With pointers INTENT only applies to the pointer itself. There is no way to indicate the constant status of the data.

In C, you can have a const pointer to modifiable data, or a non-const pointer to const data, or a const pointer to const data. INTENT was originally not supported for pointers due to the ambiguity of the attribute belonging to the pointer or the pointee, but there should be a way to support both.

This feature would also allow tables data to be initialized with DATA statements, flagged as constant, and placed in read-only memory at run-time.

PROTECTED may be a attribute for non-modifiable data. In C headers, const is used to indicate whether data can be modified from a given scope, although the same data may not be constant from another scope. Therefore, PROTECTED is a better match for C behavior. Data objects can still be placed in read-only memory if they are PROTECTED in all scopes. However, this idea may conflict with the existing use of PROTECTED.