Questions tagged [fortran2008]

Fortran 2008 is an extension to the 2003 Standard and was released on June 7, 2010.

Fortran (previously FORTRAN, derived from Formula Translating System) is a general-purpose, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry. It is one of the most popular languages in the area of high-performance computing and is the language used for programs that benchmark and rank the world's fastest supercomputers.

Amongst other improvements, Fortran 2008 brings concurrent programming to Fortran.

The new capabilities include:

• Submodules – Additional structuring facilities for modules; supersedes ISO/IEC TR 19767:2005
• Coarray Fortran – a parallel execution model
• The DO CONCURRENT construct – for loop iterations with no interdependencies
• The CONTIGUOUS attribute – to specify storage layout restrictions
• The BLOCK construct – can contain declarations of objects with construct scope
• Recursive allocatable components – as an alternative to recursive pointers in derived types

A summary of new features can be found in the Fortran wiki, the complete Standard document is available here.

References:

• Wikipedia