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Fortran 2008

Fortran 2008 is a minor revision of Fortran 2003.

The final draft of the Fortran 2008 standard, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 5/N1830, was released on June 7, 2010 and is available from the WG5’s FTP server at ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/N1801-N1850/N1830.pdf.

For compiler support, see Fortran 2008 status.

Summary of New Features

New features include:

• Submodules
• Coarrays
• do concurrent construct
• contiguous attribute
• block construct
• exit statement
• error stop statement
• Internal procedures can be passed as actual arguments
• Procedure pointers can point to an internal procedure
• Maximum rank increased to 15
• newunit= in open statement
• g0 edit descriptor
• Unlimited format item

Changes to existing intrinsic procedures:

• acos, asin, atan, cosh, sinh, tan, and tanh now accept complex arguments.
• atan2 can now be referenced as atan.
• lge, lgt, lle, and llt now accept arguments of ASCII kind.
• maxloc and minloc now have an optional back= argument.
• selected_real_kind now has a radix= argument.

New intrinsic procedures:

• Special functions
  • Inverse hyperbolic trigonometric functions: acosh, asinh, and atanh.
  • Bessel functions: bessel_j0, bessel_j1, bessel_jn, bessel_y0, bessel_y1, and bessel_yn.
  • Error function: erf, erfc, and erfc_scaled.
  • Gamma function: gamma and log_gamma.
  • Euclidean distance: hypot.
  • $L_2$ norm: norm2.
• Bitwise operations:
  • Bit sequence comparisons: bge, bgt, ble, and blt.
  • Combined shifting: dshiftl and dshiftr.
  • Counting bits: leadz, trailz, popcnt and poppar.
  • Masking bits: maskl and maskr.
  • Shifting bits: shifta, shiftl and shiftr.
  • Merging bits: merge_bits.
  • Bit transformational functions: iall, iany, and iparity.
• Coarray intrinsics:
  • Convert a cosubscript to an image index: image_index.
  • Cobounds of a coarray: lcobound and ucobound.
  • Number of images: num_images.
  • Image index or cosubscripts: this_image.
• Other:
  • Test for the contiguous attribute: is_contiguous?.
  • Size of an element in bits: storage_size.
  • Tests for the number of true values being odd: parity.
  • Search for a value in an array: findloc.
  • Shell commands: execute_command_line.
  • Define and reference variables atomically: atomic_define and atomic_ref.

Additions to intrinsic modules:

• iso_fortran_env:

  • Information about the compiler: compiler_version and compiler_options.
  • Named constants for selecting kind values.

• ieee_arithmetic:

  • ieee_selected_real_kind now has a radix= argument.

• iso_c_binding:

  • c_sizeof returns the size of an array element in bytes.

Declared Obsolete:

• entry (Fortran 77 and later)

News

• John Reid announced on 2010 September 10th that the Final Draft International Standard had been approved by ISO by 18 votes to nil with 15 abstentions. The standard is likely to be published by ISO within two months, i.e. by the end of November 2010.

Standards Documents

J3 Documents:

• Work Plan
• Schedule

Latest draft accepted by the ISO Secretariat:

• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 5/N1830 (June 7, 2010)

Previous drafts of the standard:

• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 5/N1826 (April 20, 2010)

• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 5/N1791 (August 28, 2009)

• ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 22/WG 5/N1776 (March 25, 2009)

See Also

• Fortran 2003

References

• Reid, John (2008). The new features of Fortran 2008. ACM Fortran Forum 27(2), 8-21. (See also N1729)
• Reid, J. (2010). Coarrays in the next Fortran Standard. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG5 N1824.