The New Features Of Fortran 2003

Fortran 2003 is a major extension of Fortran 95. This contrasts with Fortran 95, which was a minor extension of Fortran 90. Beside the two TR items, the major changes concern object orientation and interfacing with C. Allocatable arrays are very important for optimization – after all, good execution speed is Fortran’s forte. Exception handling is needed to write robust code.
Object orientation provides an effective way to separate programming into independent tasks and to build upon existing codes; we describe these features in Section 2. Interfacing with C is needed to allow programmers ease of access to system routines which are often written in C and to allow C programmers to call efficient Fortran codes; we describe these features in Section 5. There are also many less major enhancements, described in Sections 3 and 4.