Fortran Wiki
recursion

Recursion

Fortran 77 did not explicitly allow recursive functions and subroutines, although there were several ways around this eg Fortran Examples. From Fortran 90 onwards, recursive functions and subroutines could be declared and used freely.

A well known recursion benchmark:

 program ackermann
   integer :: ack
   write(*,*) ack(3, 12)
 end program ackermann

 recursive function ack(m, n) result(a)
   integer, intent(in) :: m,n
   integer :: a
   if (m == 0) then
     a=n+1
   else if (n == 0) then
     a=ack(m-1,1)
   else
     a=ack(m-1, ack(m, n-1))
   end if
 end function ack

One more working example

Compiler LanguageTotal time
gcc C 0.80 s
gfortran 4.4.3 Fortran 2.97 s
gfortran 4.6.0 Fortran 2.91 s
g95 0.93 Fortran 6.19 s
Stalin scheme 7.35 s

(Note that the Fortran version can perform at the same speed as the C implementation if F2003 pass-by-value is used.)