vi Preface
reader toward acquiring programming skills to produce Fortran programs that are
readable, maintainable, and efficient.
Case studies are used to illustrate the practical use of features of Fortran 03 and to
show how complete programs are put together. There are also simple problems to en-
able the reader to exercise knowledge of the topics learned.
Style of the Programming Examples
To illustrate the author’s opinion of good Fortran programming style, the program-
ming examples do not illustrate the wide variety of styles that might be used. There are
certainly many other good programming styles, but it is important to use a style con-
sistently within a programming project. The style notes also reflect opinions of the au-
thor and reflect but one possible good style to use.
Most of the program examples have been run on either the Numerical Algorithms
Group NAGWare Fortran 03 compiler (
nag.com) or the free g95 compiler (g95.org).
Organization of the Content
An unusual feature of the book is that the first chapter contains a complete discussion
of all the basic features needed to write complete Fortran programs: the form of For-
tran programs, data types, simple expressions and assignment, and simple input and
output. Subsequent chapters contain detailed discussions of control constructs, mod-
ules, procedures, arrays, character strings, data structures and derived types, pointer
variables, and object-oriented programming.
Module-oriented programming is a very important part of Fortran programming
and the topic of modules is introduced earlier to provide the framework for organizing
data and procedures for a Fortran program.
From the beginning, Fortran has had extensive facilities for input and output; how-
ever, this is a topic that is not explored fully in many books because it is a little more
difficult than other features and perhaps just not as interesting as some features. The
use of these facilities is very important in production programs, so this book contains,
in Chapter 11, an extensive discussion of the excellent input/output facilities in Fortran.
Appendix A lists the many intrinsic procedures. Appendix B provides a brief infor-
mal syntax specification for the language.
There still will be occasions when more details about the language must be
learned. In these cases it will be necessary to consult the official standard, published by
the International Standards Organization or the reference work The Fortran 2003 Hand-
book, by Adams, Brainerd, Hendrickson, Maine, Martin, and Smith, Springer, 2009.
Many suggestions made by Brian Smith improved the book significantly.
Tucson, Arizona, USA Walter S. Brainerd
