The GNU Fortran Compiler

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Introduction

This manual documents the use of gfortran, the GNU Fortran compiler. You can find in this manual how to invoke gfortran, as well as its features and incompatibilities.


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1 Introduction

The GNU Fortran compiler front end was designed initially as a free replacement for, or alternative to, the Unix f95 command; gfortran is the command you will use to invoke the compiler.


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1.1 About GNU Fortran

The GNU Fortran compiler supports the Fortran 77, 90 and 95 standards completely, parts of the Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 standards, and several vendor extensions. The development goal is to provide the following features:

The GNU Fortran compiler consists of several components:


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1.2 GNU Fortran and GCC

GNU Fortran is a part of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. GCC consists of a collection of front ends for various languages, which translate the source code into a language-independent form called GENERIC. This is then processed by a common middle end which provides optimization, and then passed to one of a collection of back ends which generate code for different computer architectures and operating systems.

Functionally, this is implemented with a driver program (gcc) which provides the command-line interface for the compiler. It calls the relevant compiler front-end program (e.g., f951 for Fortran) for each file in the source code, and then calls the assembler and linker as appropriate to produce the compiled output. In a copy of GCC which has been compiled with Fortran language support enabled, gcc will recognize files with .f, .for, .ftn, .f90, .f95, .f03 and .f08 extensions as Fortran source code, and compile it accordingly. A gfortran driver program is also provided, which is identical to gcc except that it automatically links the Fortran runtime libraries into the compiled program.

Source files with .f, .for, .fpp, .ftn, .F, .FOR, .FPP, and .FTN extensions are treated as fixed form. Source files with .f90, .f95, .f03, .f08, .F90, .F95, .F03 and .F08 extensions are treated as free form. The capitalized versions of either form are run through preprocessing. Source files with the lower case .fpp extension are also run through preprocessing.

This manual specifically documents the Fortran front end, which handles the programming language’s syntax and semantics. The aspects of GCC which relate to the optimization passes and the back-end code generation are documented in the GCC manual; see Introduction in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two manuals together provide a complete reference for the GNU Fortran compiler.


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1.3 Preprocessing and conditional compilation

Many Fortran compilers including GNU Fortran allow passing the source code through a C preprocessor (CPP; sometimes also called the Fortran preprocessor, FPP) to allow for conditional compilation. In the case of GNU Fortran, this is the GNU C Preprocessor in the traditional mode. On systems with case-preserving file names, the preprocessor is automatically invoked if the filename extension is .F, .FOR, .FTN, .fpp, .FPP, .F90, .F95, .F03 or .F08. To manually invoke the preprocessor on any file, use -cpp, to disable preprocessing on files where the preprocessor is run automatically, use -nocpp.

If a preprocessed file includes another file with the Fortran INCLUDE statement, the included file is not preprocessed. To preprocess included files, use the equivalent preprocessor statement #include.

If GNU Fortran invokes the preprocessor, __GFORTRAN__ is defined and __GNUC__, __GNUC_MINOR__ and __GNUC_PATCHLEVEL__ can be used to determine the version of the compiler. See Overview in The C Preprocessor for details.

While CPP is the de-facto standard for preprocessing Fortran code, Part 3 of the Fortran 95 standard (ISO/IEC 1539-3:1998) defines Conditional Compilation, which is not widely used and not directly supported by the GNU Fortran compiler. You can use the program coco to preprocess such files (http://www.daniellnagle.com/coco.html).


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1.4 GNU Fortran and G77

The GNU Fortran compiler is the successor to g77, the Fortran 77 front end included in GCC prior to version 4. It is an entirely new program that has been designed to provide Fortran 95 support and extensibility for future Fortran language standards, as well as providing backwards compatibility for Fortran 77 and nearly all of the GNU language extensions supported by g77.


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1.5 Project Status

As soon as gfortran can parse all of the statements correctly, it will be in the “larva” state. When we generate code, the “puppa” state. When gfortran is done, we’ll see if it will be a beautiful butterfly, or just a big bug....

–Andy Vaught, April 2000

The start of the GNU Fortran 95 project was announced on the GCC homepage in March 18, 2000 (even though Andy had already been working on it for a while, of course).

The GNU Fortran compiler is able to compile nearly all standard-compliant Fortran 95, Fortran 90, and Fortran 77 programs, including a number of standard and non-standard extensions, and can be used on real-world programs. In particular, the supported extensions include OpenMP, Cray-style pointers, and several Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 features, including TR 15581. However, it is still under development and has a few remaining rough edges. There also is initial support for OpenACC. Note that this is an experimental feature, incomplete, and subject to change in future versions of GCC. See https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC for more information.

At present, the GNU Fortran compiler passes the NIST Fortran 77 Test Suite, and produces acceptable results on the LAPACK Test Suite. It also provides respectable performance on the Polyhedron Fortran compiler benchmarks and the Livermore Fortran Kernels test. It has been used to compile a number of large real-world programs, including the HARMONIE and HIRLAM weather forecasting code and the Tonto quantum chemistry package; see https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GfortranApps for an extended list.

Among other things, the GNU Fortran compiler is intended as a replacement for G77. At this point, nearly all programs that could be compiled with G77 can be compiled with GNU Fortran, although there are a few minor known regressions.

The primary work remaining to be done on GNU Fortran falls into three categories: bug fixing (primarily regarding the treatment of invalid code and providing useful error messages), improving the compiler optimizations and the performance of compiled code, and extending the compiler to support future standards—in particular, Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008.


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1.6 Standards

The GNU Fortran compiler implements ISO/IEC 1539:1997 (Fortran 95). As such, it can also compile essentially all standard-compliant Fortran 90 and Fortran 77 programs. It also supports the ISO/IEC TR-15581 enhancements to allocatable arrays.

GNU Fortran also have a partial support for ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004 (Fortran 2003), ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010 (Fortran 2008), the Technical Specification Further Interoperability of Fortran with C (ISO/IEC TS 29113:2012). Full support of those standards and future Fortran standards is planned. The current status of the support is can be found in the Fortran 2003 status, Fortran 2008 status and TS 29113 status sections of the documentation.

Additionally, the GNU Fortran compilers supports the OpenMP specification (version 4.0, http://openmp.org/wp/openmp-specifications/). There also is initial support for the OpenACC specification (targeting version 2.0, http://www.openacc.org/). Note that this is an experimental feature, incomplete, and subject to change in future versions of GCC. See https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC for more information.


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1.6.1 Varying Length Character Strings

The Fortran 95 standard specifies in Part 2 (ISO/IEC 1539-2:2000) varying length character strings. While GNU Fortran currently does not support such strings directly, there exist two Fortran implementations for them, which work with GNU Fortran. They can be found at http://www.fortran.com/iso_varying_string.f95 and at ftp://ftp.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/ISO_VARYING_STRING/.

Deferred-length character strings of Fortran 2003 supports part of the features of ISO_VARYING_STRING and should be considered as replacement. (Namely, allocatable or pointers of the type character(len=:).)


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2 GNU Fortran Command Options

The gfortran command supports all the options supported by the gcc command. Only options specific to GNU Fortran are documented here.

See GCC Command Options in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for information on the non-Fortran-specific aspects of the gcc command (and, therefore, the gfortran command).

All GCC and GNU Fortran options are accepted both by gfortran and by gcc (as well as any other drivers built at the same time, such as g++), since adding GNU Fortran to the GCC distribution enables acceptance of GNU Fortran options by all of the relevant drivers.

In some cases, options have positive and negative forms; the negative form of -ffoo would be -fno-foo. This manual documents only one of these two forms, whichever one is not the default.


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2.1 Option summary

Here is a summary of all the options specific to GNU Fortran, grouped by type. Explanations are in the following sections.

Fortran Language Options

See Options controlling Fortran dialect.

-fall-intrinsics -fbackslash -fcray-pointer -fd-lines-as-code 
-fd-lines-as-comments -fdefault-double-8 -fdefault-integer-8 
-fdefault-real-8 -fdollar-ok -ffixed-line-length-n 
-ffixed-line-length-none -ffree-form -ffree-line-length-n 
-ffree-line-length-none -fimplicit-none -finteger-4-integer-8 
-fmax-identifier-length -fmodule-private -ffixed-form -fno-range-check 
-fopenacc -fopenmp -freal-4-real-10 -freal-4-real-16 -freal-4-real-8 
-freal-8-real-10 -freal-8-real-16 -freal-8-real-4 -std=std

Preprocessing Options

See Enable and customize preprocessing.

-A-question[=answer]
-Aquestion=answer -C -CC -Dmacro[=defn]
-H -P 
-Umacro -cpp -dD -dI -dM -dN -dU -fworking-directory
-imultilib dir 
-iprefix file -iquote -isysroot dir -isystem dir -nocpp 
-nostdinc 
-undef

Error and Warning Options

See Options to request or suppress errors and warnings.

-Waliasing -Wall -Wampersand -Warray-bounds
-Wc-binding-type -Wcharacter-truncation 
-Wconversion -Wfunction-elimination -Wimplicit-interface 
-Wimplicit-procedure -Wintrinsic-shadow -Wuse-without-only -Wintrinsics-std 
-Wline-truncation -Wno-align-commons -Wno-tabs -Wreal-q-constant 
-Wsurprising -Wunderflow -Wunused-parameter -Wrealloc-lhs -Wrealloc-lhs-all 
-Wtarget-lifetime -fmax-errors=n -fsyntax-only -pedantic -pedantic-errors

Debugging Options

See Options for debugging your program or GNU Fortran.

-fbacktrace -fdump-fortran-optimized -fdump-fortran-original 
-fdump-parse-tree -ffpe-trap=list -ffpe-summary=list

Directory Options

See Options for directory search.

-Idir  -Jdir -fintrinsic-modules-path dir
Link Options

See Options for influencing the linking step.

-static-libgfortran
Runtime Options

See Options for influencing runtime behavior.

-fconvert=conversion -fmax-subrecord-length=length 
-frecord-marker=length -fsign-zero

Code Generation Options

See Options for code generation conventions.

-faggressive-function-elimination -fblas-matmul-limit=n 
-fbounds-check -fcheck-array-temporaries 
-fcheck=<all|array-temps|bounds|do|mem|pointer|recursion> 
-fcoarray=<none|single|lib> -fexternal-blas -ff2c
-ffrontend-optimize 
-finit-character=n -finit-integer=n -finit-local-zero 
-finit-logical=<true|false>
-finit-real=<zero|inf|-inf|nan|snan> 
-fmax-array-constructor=n -fmax-stack-var-size=n
-fno-align-commons 
-fno-automatic -fno-protect-parens -fno-underscoring 
-fsecond-underscore -fpack-derived -frealloc-lhs -frecursive 
-frepack-arrays -fshort-enums -fstack-arrays


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2.2 Options controlling Fortran dialect

The following options control the details of the Fortran dialect accepted by the compiler:

-ffree-form
-ffixed-form

Specify the layout used by the source file. The free form layout was introduced in Fortran 90. Fixed form was traditionally used in older Fortran programs. When neither option is specified, the source form is determined by the file extension.

-fall-intrinsics

This option causes all intrinsic procedures (including the GNU-specific extensions) to be accepted. This can be useful with -std=f95 to force standard-compliance but get access to the full range of intrinsics available with gfortran. As a consequence, -Wintrinsics-std will be ignored and no user-defined procedure with the same name as any intrinsic will be called except when it is explicitly declared EXTERNAL.

-fd-lines-as-code
-fd-lines-as-comments

Enable special treatment for lines beginning with d or D in fixed form sources. If the -fd-lines-as-code option is given they are treated as if the first column contained a blank. If the -fd-lines-as-comments option is given, they are treated as comment lines.

-fdollar-ok

Allow ‘$’ as a valid non-first character in a symbol name. Symbols that start with ‘$’ are rejected since it is unclear which rules to apply to implicit typing as different vendors implement different rules. Using ‘$’ in IMPLICIT statements is also rejected.

-fbackslash

Change the interpretation of backslashes in string literals from a single backslash character to “C-style” escape characters. The following combinations are expanded \a, \b, \f, \n, \r, \t, \v, \\, and \0 to the ASCII characters alert, backspace, form feed, newline, carriage return, horizontal tab, vertical tab, backslash, and NUL, respectively. Additionally, \xnn, \unnnn and \Unnnnnnnn (where each n is a hexadecimal digit) are translated into the Unicode characters corresponding to the specified code points. All other combinations of a character preceded by \ are unexpanded.

-fmodule-private

Set the default accessibility of module entities to PRIVATE. Use-associated entities will not be accessible unless they are explicitly declared as PUBLIC.

-ffixed-line-length-n

Set column after which characters are ignored in typical fixed-form lines in the source file, and through which spaces are assumed (as if padded to that length) after the ends of short fixed-form lines.

Popular values for n include 72 (the standard and the default), 80 (card image), and 132 (corresponding to “extended-source” options in some popular compilers). n may also be ‘none’, meaning that the entire line is meaningful and that continued character constants never have implicit spaces appended to them to fill out the line. -ffixed-line-length-0 means the same thing as -ffixed-line-length-none.

-ffree-line-length-n

Set column after which characters are ignored in typical free-form lines in the source file. The default value is 132. n may be ‘none’, meaning that the entire line is meaningful. -ffree-line-length-0 means the same thing as -ffree-line-length-none.

-fmax-identifier-length=n

Specify the maximum allowed identifier length. Typical values are 31 (Fortran 95) and 63 (Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008).

-fimplicit-none

Specify that no implicit typing is allowed, unless overridden by explicit IMPLICIT statements. This is the equivalent of adding implicit none to the start of every procedure.

-fcray-pointer

Enable the Cray pointer extension, which provides C-like pointer functionality.

-fopenacc

Enable the OpenACC extensions. This includes OpenACC !$acc directives in free form and c$acc, *$acc and !$acc directives in fixed form, !$ conditional compilation sentinels in free form and c$, *$ and !$ sentinels in fixed form, and when linking arranges for the OpenACC runtime library to be linked in.

Note that this is an experimental feature, incomplete, and subject to change in future versions of GCC. See https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC for more information.

-fopenmp

Enable the OpenMP extensions. This includes OpenMP !$omp directives in free form and c$omp, *$omp and !$omp directives in fixed form, !$ conditional compilation sentinels in free form and c$, *$ and !$ sentinels in fixed form, and when linking arranges for the OpenMP runtime library to be linked in. The option -fopenmp implies -frecursive.

-fno-range-check

Disable range checking on results of simplification of constant expressions during compilation. For example, GNU Fortran will give an error at compile time when simplifying a = 1. / 0. With this option, no error will be given and a will be assigned the value +Infinity. If an expression evaluates to a value outside of the relevant range of [-HUGE():HUGE()], then the expression will be replaced by -Inf or +Inf as appropriate. Similarly, DATA i/Z'FFFFFFFF'/ will result in an integer overflow on most systems, but with -fno-range-check the value will “wrap around” and i will be initialized to -1 instead.

-fdefault-integer-8

Set the default integer and logical types to an 8 byte wide type. This option also affects the kind of integer constants like 42. Unlike -finteger-4-integer-8, it does not promote variables with explicit kind declaration.

-fdefault-real-8

Set the default real type to an 8 byte wide type. This option also affects the kind of non-double real constants like 1.0, and does promote the default width of DOUBLE PRECISION to 16 bytes if possible, unless -fdefault-double-8 is given, too. Unlike -freal-4-real-8, it does not promote variables with explicit kind declaration.

-fdefault-double-8

Set the DOUBLE PRECISION type to an 8 byte wide type. Do nothing if this is already the default. If -fdefault-real-8 is given, DOUBLE PRECISION would instead be promoted to 16 bytes if possible, and -fdefault-double-8 can be used to prevent this. The kind of real constants like 1.d0 will not be changed by -fdefault-real-8 though, so also -fdefault-double-8 does not affect it.

-finteger-4-integer-8

Promote all INTEGER(KIND=4) entities to an INTEGER(KIND=8) entities. If KIND=8 is unavailable, then an error will be issued. This option should be used with care and may not be suitable for your codes. Areas of possible concern include calls to external procedures, alignment in EQUIVALENCE and/or COMMON, generic interfaces, BOZ literal constant conversion, and I/O. Inspection of the intermediate representation of the translated Fortran code, produced by -fdump-tree-original, is suggested.

-freal-4-real-8
-freal-4-real-10
-freal-4-real-16
-freal-8-real-4
-freal-8-real-10
-freal-8-real-16

Promote all REAL(KIND=M) entities to REAL(KIND=N) entities. If REAL(KIND=N) is unavailable, then an error will be issued. All other real kind types are unaffected by this option. These options should be used with care and may not be suitable for your codes. Areas of possible concern include calls to external procedures, alignment in EQUIVALENCE and/or COMMON, generic interfaces, BOZ literal constant conversion, and I/O. Inspection of the intermediate representation of the translated Fortran code, produced by -fdump-tree-original, is suggested.

-std=std

Specify the standard to which the program is expected to conform, which may be one of ‘f95’, ‘f2003’, ‘f2008’, ‘gnu’, or ‘legacy’. The default value for std is ‘gnu’, which specifies a superset of the Fortran 95 standard that includes all of the extensions supported by GNU Fortran, although warnings will be given for obsolete extensions not recommended for use in new code. The ‘legacy’ value is equivalent but without the warnings for obsolete extensions, and may be useful for old non-standard programs. The ‘f95’, ‘f2003’ and ‘f2008’ values specify strict conformance to the Fortran 95, Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008 standards, respectively; errors are given for all extensions beyond the relevant language standard, and warnings are given for the Fortran 77 features that are permitted but obsolescent in later standards. ‘-std=f2008ts’ allows the Fortran 2008 standard including the additions of the Technical Specification (TS) 29113 on Further Interoperability of Fortran with C and TS 18508 on Additional Parallel Features in Fortran.


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2.3 Enable and customize preprocessing

Preprocessor related options. See section Preprocessing and conditional compilation for more detailed information on preprocessing in gfortran.

-cpp
-nocpp

Enable preprocessing. The preprocessor is automatically invoked if the file extension is .fpp, .FPP, .F, .FOR, .FTN, .F90, .F95, .F03 or .F08. Use this option to manually enable preprocessing of any kind of Fortran file.

To disable preprocessing of files with any of the above listed extensions, use the negative form: -nocpp.

The preprocessor is run in traditional mode. Any restrictions of the file-format, especially the limits on line length, apply for preprocessed output as well, so it might be advisable to use the -ffree-line-length-none or -ffixed-line-length-none options.

-dM

Instead of the normal output, generate a list of '#define' directives for all the macros defined during the execution of the preprocessor, including predefined macros. This gives you a way of finding out what is predefined in your version of the preprocessor. Assuming you have no file foo.f90, the command

  touch foo.f90; gfortran -cpp -E -dM foo.f90

will show all the predefined macros.

-dD

Like -dM except in two respects: it does not include the predefined macros, and it outputs both the #define directives and the result of preprocessing. Both kinds of output go to the standard output file.

-dN

Like -dD, but emit only the macro names, not their expansions.

-dU

Like dD except that only macros that are expanded, or whose definedness is tested in preprocessor directives, are output; the output is delayed until the use or test of the macro; and '#undef' directives are also output for macros tested but undefined at the time.

-dI

Output '#include' directives in addition to the result of preprocessing.

-fworking-directory

Enable generation of linemarkers in the preprocessor output that will let the compiler know the current working directory at the time of preprocessing. When this option is enabled, the preprocessor will emit, after the initial linemarker, a second linemarker with the current working directory followed by two slashes. GCC will use this directory, when it is present in the preprocessed input, as the directory emitted as the current working directory in some debugging information formats. This option is implicitly enabled if debugging information is enabled, but this can be inhibited with the negated form -fno-working-directory. If the -P flag is present in the command line, this option has no effect, since no #line directives are emitted whatsoever.

-idirafter dir

Search dir for include files, but do it after all directories specified with -I and the standard system directories have been exhausted. dir is treated as a system include directory. If dir begins with =, then the = will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see --sysroot and -isysroot.

-imultilib dir

Use dir as a subdirectory of the directory containing target-specific C++ headers.

-iprefix prefix

Specify prefix as the prefix for subsequent -iwithprefix options. If the prefix represents a directory, you should include the final '/'.

-isysroot dir

This option is like the --sysroot option, but applies only to header files. See the --sysroot option for more information.

-iquote dir

Search dir only for header files requested with #include "file"; they are not searched for #include <file>, before all directories specified by -I and before the standard system directories. If dir begins with =, then the = will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see --sysroot and -isysroot.

-isystem dir

Search dir for header files, after all directories specified by -I but before the standard system directories. Mark it as a system directory, so that it gets the same special treatment as is applied to the standard system directories. If dir begins with =, then the = will be replaced by the sysroot prefix; see --sysroot and -isysroot.

-nostdinc

Do not search the standard system directories for header files. Only the directories you have specified with -I options (and the directory of the current file, if appropriate) are searched.

-undef

Do not predefine any system-specific or GCC-specific macros. The standard predefined macros remain defined.

-Apredicate=answer

Make an assertion with the predicate predicate and answer answer. This form is preferred to the older form -A predicate(answer), which is still supported, because it does not use shell special characters.

-A-predicate=answer

Cancel an assertion with the predicate predicate and answer answer.

-C

Do not discard comments. All comments are passed through to the output file, except for comments in processed directives, which are deleted along with the directive.

You should be prepared for side effects when using -C; it causes the preprocessor to treat comments as tokens in their own right. For example, comments appearing at the start of what would be a directive line have the effect of turning that line into an ordinary source line, since the first token on the line is no longer a '#'.

Warning: this currently handles C-Style comments only. The preprocessor does not yet recognize Fortran-style comments.

-CC

Do not discard comments, including during macro expansion. This is like -C, except that comments contained within macros are also passed through to the output file where the macro is expanded.

In addition to the side-effects of the -C option, the -CC option causes all C++-style comments inside a macro to be converted to C-style comments. This is to prevent later use of that macro from inadvertently commenting out the remainder of the source line. The -CC option is generally used to support lint comments.

Warning: this currently handles C- and C++-Style comments only. The preprocessor does not yet recognize Fortran-style comments.

-Dname

Predefine name as a macro, with definition 1.

-Dname=definition

The contents of definition are tokenized and processed as if they appeared during translation phase three in a '#define' directive. In particular, the definition will be truncated by embedded newline characters.

If you are invoking the preprocessor from a shell or shell-like program you may need to use the shell’s quoting syntax to protect characters such as spaces that have a meaning in the shell syntax.

If you wish to define a function-like macro on the command line, write its argument list with surrounding parentheses before the equals sign (if any). Parentheses are meaningful to most shells, so you will need to quote the option. With sh and csh, -D'name(args...)=definition' works.

-D and -U options are processed in the order they are given on the command line. All -imacros file and -include file options are processed after all -D and -U options.

-H

Print the name of each header file used, in addition to other normal activities. Each name is indented to show how deep in the '#include' stack it is.

-P

Inhibit generation of linemarkers in the output from the preprocessor. This might be useful when running the preprocessor on something that is not C code, and will be sent to a program which might be confused by the linemarkers.

-Uname

Cancel any previous definition of name, either built in or provided with a -D option.


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2.4 Options to request or suppress errors and warnings

Errors are diagnostic messages that report that the GNU Fortran compiler cannot compile the relevant piece of source code. The compiler will continue to process the program in an attempt to report further errors to aid in debugging, but will not produce any compiled output.

Warnings are diagnostic messages that report constructions which are not inherently erroneous but which are risky or suggest there is likely to be a bug in the program. Unless -Werror is specified, they do not prevent compilation of the program.

You can request many specific warnings with options beginning -W, for example -Wimplicit to request warnings on implicit declarations. Each of these specific warning options also has a negative form beginning -Wno- to turn off warnings; for example, -Wno-implicit. This manual lists only one of the two forms, whichever is not the default.

These options control the amount and kinds of errors and warnings produced by GNU Fortran:

-fmax-errors=n

Limits the maximum number of error messages to n, at which point GNU Fortran bails out rather than attempting to continue processing the source code. If n is 0, there is no limit on the number of error messages produced.

-fsyntax-only

Check the code for syntax errors, but do not actually compile it. This will generate module files for each module present in the code, but no other output file.

-pedantic

Issue warnings for uses of extensions to Fortran 95. -pedantic also applies to C-language constructs where they occur in GNU Fortran source files, such as use of ‘\e’ in a character constant within a directive like #include.

Valid Fortran 95 programs should compile properly with or without this option. However, without this option, certain GNU extensions and traditional Fortran features are supported as well. With this option, many of them are rejected.

Some users try to use -pedantic to check programs for conformance. They soon find that it does not do quite what they want—it finds some nonstandard practices, but not all. However, improvements to GNU Fortran in this area are welcome.

This should be used in conjunction with -std=f95, -std=f2003 or -std=f2008.

-pedantic-errors

Like -pedantic, except that errors are produced rather than warnings.

-Wall

Enables commonly used warning options pertaining to usage that we recommend avoiding and that we believe are easy to avoid. This currently includes -Waliasing, -Wampersand, -Wconversion, -Wsurprising, -Wc-binding-type, -Wintrinsics-std, -Wtabs, -Wintrinsic-shadow, -Wline-truncation, -Wtarget-lifetime, -Wreal-q-constant and -Wunused.

-Waliasing

Warn about possible aliasing of dummy arguments. Specifically, it warns if the same actual argument is associated with a dummy argument with INTENT(IN) and a dummy argument with INTENT(OUT) in a call with an explicit interface.

The following example will trigger the warning.

  interface
    subroutine bar(a,b)
      integer, intent(in) :: a
      integer, intent(out) :: b
    end subroutine
  end interface
  integer :: a

  call bar(a,a)
-Wampersand

Warn about missing ampersand in continued character constants. The warning is given with -Wampersand, -pedantic, -std=f95, -std=f2003 and -std=f2008. Note: With no ampersand given in a continued character constant, GNU Fortran assumes continuation at the first non-comment, non-whitespace character after the ampersand that initiated the continuation.

-Warray-temporaries

Warn about array temporaries generated by the compiler. The information generated by this warning is sometimes useful in optimization, in order to avoid such temporaries.

-Wc-binding-type

Warn if the a variable might not be C interoperable. In particular, warn if the variable has been declared using an intrinsic type with default kind instead of using a kind parameter defined for C interoperability in the intrinsic ISO_C_Binding module. This option is implied by -Wall.

-Wcharacter-truncation

Warn when a character assignment will truncate the assigned string.

-Wline-truncation

Warn when a source code line will be truncated. This option is implied by -Wall. For free-form source code, the default is -Werror=line-truncation such that truncations are reported as error.

-Wconversion

Warn about implicit conversions that are likely to change the value of the expression after conversion. Implied by -Wall.

-Wconversion-extra

Warn about implicit conversions between different types and kinds. This option does not imply -Wconversion.

-Wextra

Enables some warning options for usages of language features which may be problematic. This currently includes -Wcompare-reals and -Wunused-parameter.

-Wimplicit-interface

Warn if a procedure is called without an explicit interface. Note this only checks that an explicit interface is present. It does not check that the declared interfaces are consistent across program units.

-Wimplicit-procedure

Warn if a procedure is called that has neither an explicit interface nor has been declared as EXTERNAL.

-Wintrinsics-std

Warn if gfortran finds a procedure named like an intrinsic not available in the currently selected standard (with -std) and treats it as EXTERNAL procedure because of this. -fall-intrinsics can be used to never trigger this behavior and always link to the intrinsic regardless of the selected standard.

-Wreal-q-constant

Produce a warning if a real-literal-constant contains a q exponent-letter.

-Wsurprising

Produce a warning when “suspicious” code constructs are encountered. While technically legal these usually indicate that an error has been made.

This currently produces a warning under the following circumstances:

-Wtabs

By default, tabs are accepted as whitespace, but tabs are not members of the Fortran Character Set. For continuation lines, a tab followed by a digit between 1 and 9 is supported. -Wtabs will cause a warning to be issued if a tab is encountered. Note, -Wtabs is active for -pedantic, -std=f95, -std=f2003, -std=f2008, -std=f2008ts and -Wall.

-Wunderflow

Produce a warning when numerical constant expressions are encountered, which yield an UNDERFLOW during compilation. Enabled by default.

-Wintrinsic-shadow

Warn if a user-defined procedure or module procedure has the same name as an intrinsic; in this case, an explicit interface or EXTERNAL or INTRINSIC declaration might be needed to get calls later resolved to the desired intrinsic/procedure. This option is implied by -Wall.

-Wuse-without-only

Warn if a USE statement has no ONLY qualifier and thus implicitly imports all public entities of the used module.

-Wunused-dummy-argument

Warn about unused dummy arguments. This option is implied by -Wall.

-Wunused-parameter

Contrary to gcc’s meaning of -Wunused-parameter, gfortran’s implementation of this option does not warn about unused dummy arguments (see -Wunused-dummy-argument), but about unused PARAMETER values. -Wunused-parameter is implied by -Wextra if also -Wunused or -Wall is used.

-Walign-commons

By default, gfortran warns about any occasion of variables being padded for proper alignment inside a COMMON block. This warning can be turned off via -Wno-align-commons. See also -falign-commons.

-Wfunction-elimination

Warn if any calls to functions are eliminated by the optimizations enabled by the -ffrontend-optimize option.

-Wrealloc-lhs

Warn when the compiler might insert code to for allocation or reallocation of an allocatable array variable of intrinsic type in intrinsic assignments. In hot loops, the Fortran 2003 reallocation feature may reduce the performance. If the array is already allocated with the correct shape, consider using a whole-array array-spec (e.g. (:,:,:)) for the variable on the left-hand side to prevent the reallocation check. Note that in some cases the warning is shown, even if the compiler will optimize reallocation checks away. For instance, when the right-hand side contains the same variable multiplied by a scalar. See also -frealloc-lhs.

-Wrealloc-lhs-all

Warn when the compiler inserts code to for allocation or reallocation of an allocatable variable; this includes scalars and derived types.

-Wcompare-reals

Warn when comparing real or complex types for equality or inequality. This option is implied by -Wextra.

-Wtarget-lifetime

Warn if the pointer in a pointer assignment might be longer than the its target. This option is implied by -Wall.

-Wzerotrip

Warn if a DO loop is known to execute zero times at compile time. This option is implied by -Wall.

-Werror

Turns all warnings into errors.

See Options to Request or Suppress Errors and Warnings in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for information on more options offered by the GBE shared by gfortran, gcc and other GNU compilers.

Some of these have no effect when compiling programs written in Fortran.


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2.5 Options for debugging your program or GNU Fortran

GNU Fortran has various special options that are used for debugging either your program or the GNU Fortran compiler.

-fdump-fortran-original

Output the internal parse tree after translating the source program into internal representation. Only really useful for debugging the GNU Fortran compiler itself.

-fdump-fortran-optimized

Output the parse tree after front-end optimization. Only really useful for debugging the GNU Fortran compiler itself.

-fdump-parse-tree

Output the internal parse tree after translating the source program into internal representation. Only really useful for debugging the GNU Fortran compiler itself. This option is deprecated; use -fdump-fortran-original instead.

-ffpe-trap=list

Specify a list of floating point exception traps to enable. On most systems, if a floating point exception occurs and the trap for that exception is enabled, a SIGFPE signal will be sent and the program being aborted, producing a core file useful for debugging. list is a (possibly empty) comma-separated list of the following exceptions: ‘invalid’ (invalid floating point operation, such as SQRT(-1.0)), ‘zero’ (division by zero), ‘overflow’ (overflow in a floating point operation), ‘underflow’ (underflow in a floating point operation), ‘inexact’ (loss of precision during operation), and ‘denormal’ (operation performed on a denormal value). The first five exceptions correspond to the five IEEE 754 exceptions, whereas the last one (‘denormal’) is not part of the IEEE 754 standard but is available on some common architectures such as x86.

The first three exceptions (‘invalid’, ‘zero’, and ‘overflow’) often indicate serious errors, and unless the program has provisions for dealing with these exceptions, enabling traps for these three exceptions is probably a good idea.

Many, if not most, floating point operations incur loss of precision due to rounding, and hence the ffpe-trap=inexact is likely to be uninteresting in practice.

By default no exception traps are enabled.

-ffpe-summary=list

Specify a list of floating-point exceptions, whose flag status is printed to ERROR_UNIT when invoking STOP and ERROR STOP. list can be either ‘none’, ‘all’ or a comma-separated list of the following exceptions: ‘invalid’, ‘zero’, ‘overflow’, ‘underflow’, ‘inexact’ and ‘denormal’. (See -ffpe-trap for a description of the exceptions.)

By default, a summary for all exceptions but ‘inexact’ is shown.

-fno-backtrace

When a serious runtime error is encountered or a deadly signal is emitted (segmentation fault, illegal instruction, bus error, floating-point exception, and the other POSIX signals that have the action ‘core’), the Fortran runtime library tries to output a backtrace of the error. -fno-backtrace disables the backtrace generation. This option only has influence for compilation of the Fortran main program.

See Options for Debugging Your Program or GCC in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for more information on debugging options.


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2.6 Options for directory search

These options affect how GNU Fortran searches for files specified by the INCLUDE directive and where it searches for previously compiled modules.

It also affects the search paths used by cpp when used to preprocess Fortran source.

-Idir

These affect interpretation of the INCLUDE directive (as well as of the #include directive of the cpp preprocessor).

Also note that the general behavior of -I and INCLUDE is pretty much the same as of -I with #include in the cpp preprocessor, with regard to looking for header.gcc files and other such things.

This path is also used to search for .mod files when previously compiled modules are required by a USE statement.

See Options for Directory Search in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for information on the -I option.

-Jdir

This option specifies where to put .mod files for compiled modules. It is also added to the list of directories to searched by an USE statement.

The default is the current directory.

-fintrinsic-modules-path dir

This option specifies the location of pre-compiled intrinsic modules, if they are not in the default location expected by the compiler.


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2.7 Influencing the linking step

These options come into play when the compiler links object files into an executable output file. They are meaningless if the compiler is not doing a link step.

-static-libgfortran

On systems that provide libgfortran as a shared and a static library, this option forces the use of the static version. If no shared version of libgfortran was built when the compiler was configured, this option has no effect.


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2.8 Influencing runtime behavior

These options affect the runtime behavior of programs compiled with GNU Fortran.

-fconvert=conversion

Specify the representation of data for unformatted files. Valid values for conversion are: ‘native’, the default; ‘swap’, swap between big- and little-endian; ‘big-endian’, use big-endian representation for unformatted files; ‘little-endian’, use little-endian representation for unformatted files.

This option has an effect only when used in the main program. The CONVERT specifier and the GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT environment variable override the default specified by -fconvert.

-frecord-marker=length

Specify the length of record markers for unformatted files. Valid values for length are 4 and 8. Default is 4. This is different from previous versions of gfortran, which specified a default record marker length of 8 on most systems. If you want to read or write files compatible with earlier versions of gfortran, use -frecord-marker=8.

-fmax-subrecord-length=length

Specify the maximum length for a subrecord. The maximum permitted value for length is 2147483639, which is also the default. Only really useful for use by the gfortran testsuite.

-fsign-zero

When enabled, floating point numbers of value zero with the sign bit set are written as negative number in formatted output and treated as negative in the SIGN intrinsic. -fno-sign-zero does not print the negative sign of zero values (or values rounded to zero for I/O) and regards zero as positive number in the SIGN intrinsic for compatibility with Fortran 77. The default is -fsign-zero.


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2.9 Options for code generation conventions

These machine-independent options control the interface conventions used in code generation.

Most of them have both positive and negative forms; the negative form of -ffoo would be -fno-foo. In the table below, only one of the forms is listed—the one which is not the default. You can figure out the other form by either removing no- or adding it.

-fno-automatic

Treat each program unit (except those marked as RECURSIVE) as if the SAVE statement were specified for every local variable and array referenced in it. Does not affect common blocks. (Some Fortran compilers provide this option under the name -static or -save.) The default, which is -fautomatic, uses the stack for local variables smaller than the value given by -fmax-stack-var-size. Use the option -frecursive to use no static memory.

-ff2c

Generate code designed to be compatible with code generated by g77 and f2c.

The calling conventions used by g77 (originally implemented in f2c) require functions that return type default REAL to actually return the C type double, and functions that return type COMPLEX to return the values via an extra argument in the calling sequence that points to where to store the return value. Under the default GNU calling conventions, such functions simply return their results as they would in GNU C—default REAL functions return the C type float, and COMPLEX functions return the GNU C type complex. Additionally, this option implies the -fsecond-underscore option, unless -fno-second-underscore is explicitly requested.

This does not affect the generation of code that interfaces with the libgfortran library.

Caution: It is not a good idea to mix Fortran code compiled with -ff2c with code compiled with the default -fno-f2c calling conventions as, calling COMPLEX or default REAL functions between program parts which were compiled with different calling conventions will break at execution time.

Caution: This will break code which passes intrinsic functions of type default REAL or COMPLEX as actual arguments, as the library implementations use the -fno-f2c calling conventions.

-fno-underscoring

Do not transform names of entities specified in the Fortran source file by appending underscores to them.

With -funderscoring in effect, GNU Fortran appends one underscore to external names with no underscores. This is done to ensure compatibility with code produced by many UNIX Fortran compilers.

Caution: The default behavior of GNU Fortran is incompatible with f2c and g77, please use the -ff2c option if you want object files compiled with GNU Fortran to be compatible with object code created with these tools.

Use of -fno-underscoring is not recommended unless you are experimenting with issues such as integration of GNU Fortran into existing system environments (vis-à-vis existing libraries, tools, and so on).

For example, with -funderscoring, and assuming that j() and max_count() are external functions while my_var and lvar are local variables, a statement like

I = J() + MAX_COUNT (MY_VAR, LVAR)

is implemented as something akin to:

i = j_() + max_count__(&my_var__, &lvar);

With -fno-underscoring, the same statement is implemented as:

i = j() + max_count(&my_var, &lvar);

Use of -fno-underscoring allows direct specification of user-defined names while debugging and when interfacing GNU Fortran code with other languages.

Note that just because the names match does not mean that the interface implemented by GNU Fortran for an external name matches the interface implemented by some other language for that same name. That is, getting code produced by GNU Fortran to link to code produced by some other compiler using this or any other method can be only a small part of the overall solution—getting the code generated by both compilers to agree on issues other than naming can require significant effort, and, unlike naming disagreements, linkers normally cannot detect disagreements in these other areas.

Also, note that with -fno-underscoring, the lack of appended underscores introduces the very real possibility that a user-defined external name will conflict with a name in a system library, which could make finding unresolved-reference bugs quite difficult in some cases—they might occur at program run time, and show up only as buggy behavior at run time.

In future versions of GNU Fortran we hope to improve naming and linking issues so that debugging always involves using the names as they appear in the source, even if the names as seen by the linker are mangled to prevent accidental linking between procedures with incompatible interfaces.

-fsecond-underscore

By default, GNU Fortran appends an underscore to external names. If this option is used GNU Fortran appends two underscores to names with underscores and one underscore to external names with no underscores. GNU Fortran also appends two underscores to internal names with underscores to avoid naming collisions with external names.

This option has no effect if -fno-underscoring is in effect. It is implied by the -ff2c option.

Otherwise, with this option, an external name such as MAX_COUNT is implemented as a reference to the link-time external symbol max_count__, instead of max_count_. This is required for compatibility with g77 and f2c, and is implied by use of the -ff2c option.

-fcoarray=<keyword>
none

Disable coarray support; using coarray declarations and image-control statements will produce a compile-time error. (Default)

single

Single-image mode, i.e. num_images() is always one.

lib

Library-based coarray parallelization; a suitable GNU Fortran coarray library needs to be linked.

-fcheck=<keyword>

Enable the generation of run-time checks; the argument shall be a comma-delimited list of the following keywords.

all

Enable all run-time test of -fcheck.

array-temps

Warns at run time when for passing an actual argument a temporary array had to be generated. The information generated by this warning is sometimes useful in optimization, in order to avoid such temporaries.

Note: The warning is only printed once per location.

bounds

Enable generation of run-time checks for array subscripts and against the declared minimum and maximum values. It also checks array indices for assumed and deferred shape arrays against the actual allocated bounds and ensures that all string lengths are equal for character array constructors without an explicit typespec.

Some checks require that -fcheck=bounds is set for the compilation of the main program.

Note: In the future this may also include other forms of checking, e.g., checking substring references.

do

Enable generation of run-time checks for invalid modification of loop iteration variables.

mem

Enable generation of run-time checks for memory allocation. Note: This option does not affect explicit allocations using the ALLOCATE statement, which will be always checked.

pointer

Enable generation of run-time checks for pointers and allocatables.

recursion

Enable generation of run-time checks for recursively called subroutines and functions which are not marked as recursive. See also -frecursive. Note: This check does not work for OpenMP programs and is disabled if used together with -frecursive and -fopenmp.

-fbounds-check

Deprecated alias for -fcheck=bounds.

-fcheck-array-temporaries

Deprecated alias for -fcheck=array-temps.

-fmax-array-constructor=n

This option can be used to increase the upper limit permitted in array constructors. The code below requires this option to expand the array at compile time.

program test
implicit none
integer j
integer, parameter :: n = 100000
integer, parameter :: i(n) = (/ (2*j, j = 1, n) /)
print '(10(I0,1X))', i
end program test

Caution: This option can lead to long compile times and excessively large object files.

The default value for n is 65535.

-fmax-stack-var-size=n

This option specifies the size in bytes of the largest array that will be put on the stack; if the size is exceeded static memory is used (except in procedures marked as RECURSIVE). Use the option -frecursive to allow for recursive procedures which do not have a RECURSIVE attribute or for parallel programs. Use -fno-automatic to never use the stack.

This option currently only affects local arrays declared with constant bounds, and may not apply to all character variables. Future versions of GNU Fortran may improve this behavior.

The default value for n is 32768.

-fstack-arrays

Adding this option will make the Fortran compiler put all local arrays, even those of unknown size onto stack memory. If your program uses very large local arrays it is possible that you will have to extend your runtime limits for stack memory on some operating systems. This flag is enabled by default at optimization level -Ofast.

-fpack-derived

This option tells GNU Fortran to pack derived type members as closely as possible. Code compiled with this option is likely to be incompatible with code compiled without this option, and may execute slower.

-frepack-arrays

In some circumstances GNU Fortran may pass assumed shape array sections via a descriptor describing a noncontiguous area of memory. This option adds code to the function prologue to repack the data into a contiguous block at runtime.

This should result in faster accesses to the array. However it can introduce significant overhead to the function call, especially when the passed data is noncontiguous.

-fshort-enums

This option is provided for interoperability with C code that was compiled with the -fshort-enums option. It will make GNU Fortran choose the smallest INTEGER kind a given enumerator set will fit in, and give all its enumerators this kind.

-fexternal-blas

This option will make gfortran generate calls to BLAS functions for some matrix operations like MATMUL, instead of using our own algorithms, if the size of the matrices involved is larger than a given limit (see -fblas-matmul-limit). This may be profitable if an optimized vendor BLAS library is available. The BLAS library will have to be specified at link time.

-fblas-matmul-limit=n

Only significant when -fexternal-blas is in effect. Matrix multiplication of matrices with size larger than (or equal to) n will be performed by calls to BLAS functions, while others will be handled by gfortran internal algorithms. If the matrices involved are not square, the size comparison is performed using the geometric mean of the dimensions of the argument and result matrices.

The default value for n is 30.

-frecursive

Allow indirect recursion by forcing all local arrays to be allocated on the stack. This flag cannot be used together with -fmax-stack-var-size= or -fno-automatic.

-finit-local-zero
-finit-integer=n
-finit-real=<zero|inf|-inf|nan|snan>
-finit-logical=<true|false>
-finit-character=n

The -finit-local-zero option instructs the compiler to initialize local INTEGER, REAL, and COMPLEX variables to zero, LOGICAL variables to false, and CHARACTER variables to a string of null bytes. Finer-grained initialization options are provided by the -finit-integer=n, -finit-real=<zero|inf|-inf|nan|snan> (which also initializes the real and imaginary parts of local COMPLEX variables), -finit-logical=<true|false>, and -finit-character=n (where n is an ASCII character value) options. These options do not initialize

(These limitations may be removed in future releases).

Note that the -finit-real=nan option initializes REAL and COMPLEX variables with a quiet NaN. For a signalling NaN use -finit-real=snan; note, however, that compile-time optimizations may convert them into quiet NaN and that trapping needs to be enabled (e.g. via -ffpe-trap).

Finally, note that enabling any of the -finit-* options will silence warnings that would have been emitted by -Wuninitialized for the affected local variables.

-falign-commons

By default, gfortran enforces proper alignment of all variables in a COMMON block by padding them as needed. On certain platforms this is mandatory, on others it increases performance. If a COMMON block is not declared with consistent data types everywhere, this padding can cause trouble, and -fno-align-commons can be used to disable automatic alignment. The same form of this option should be used for all files that share a COMMON block. To avoid potential alignment issues in COMMON blocks, it is recommended to order objects from largest to smallest.

-fno-protect-parens

By default the parentheses in expression are honored for all optimization levels such that the compiler does not do any re-association. Using -fno-protect-parens allows the compiler to reorder REAL and COMPLEX expressions to produce faster code. Note that for the re-association optimization -fno-signed-zeros and -fno-trapping-math need to be in effect. The parentheses protection is enabled by default, unless -Ofast is given.

-frealloc-lhs

An allocatable left-hand side of an intrinsic assignment is automatically (re)allocated if it is either unallocated or has a different shape. The option is enabled by default except when -std=f95 is given. See also -Wrealloc-lhs.

-faggressive-function-elimination

Functions with identical argument lists are eliminated within statements, regardless of whether these functions are marked PURE or not. For example, in

  a = f(b,c) + f(b,c)

there will only be a single call to f. This option only works if -ffrontend-optimize is in effect.

-ffrontend-optimize

This option performs front-end optimization, based on manipulating parts the Fortran parse tree. Enabled by default by any -O option. Optimizations enabled by this option include elimination of identical function calls within expressions, removing unnecessary calls to TRIM in comparisons and assignments and replacing TRIM(a) with a(1:LEN_TRIM(a)). It can be deselected by specifying -fno-frontend-optimize.

See Options for Code Generation Conventions in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for information on more options offered by the GBE shared by gfortran, gcc, and other GNU compilers.


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2.10 Environment variables affecting gfortran

The gfortran compiler currently does not make use of any environment variables to control its operation above and beyond those that affect the operation of gcc.

See Environment Variables Affecting GCC in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for information on environment variables.

See Runtime, for environment variables that affect the run-time behavior of programs compiled with GNU Fortran.


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3 Runtime: Influencing runtime behavior with environment variables

The behavior of the gfortran can be influenced by environment variables.

Malformed environment variables are silently ignored.


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3.1 TMPDIR—Directory for scratch files

When opening a file with STATUS='SCRATCH', GNU Fortran tries to create the file in one of the potential directories by testing each directory in the order below.

  1. The environment variable TMPDIR, if it exists.
  2. On the MinGW target, the directory returned by the GetTempPath function. Alternatively, on the Cygwin target, the TMP and TEMP environment variables, if they exist, in that order.
  3. The P_tmpdir macro if it is defined, otherwise the directory /tmp.

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3.2 GFORTRAN_STDIN_UNIT—Unit number for standard input

This environment variable can be used to select the unit number preconnected to standard input. This must be a positive integer. The default value is 5.


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3.3 GFORTRAN_STDOUT_UNIT—Unit number for standard output

This environment variable can be used to select the unit number preconnected to standard output. This must be a positive integer. The default value is 6.


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3.4 GFORTRAN_STDERR_UNIT—Unit number for standard error

This environment variable can be used to select the unit number preconnected to standard error. This must be a positive integer. The default value is 0.


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3.5 GFORTRAN_UNBUFFERED_ALL—Do not buffer I/O on all units

This environment variable controls whether all I/O is unbuffered. If the first letter is ‘y’, ‘Y’ or ‘1’, all I/O is unbuffered. This will slow down small sequential reads and writes. If the first letter is ‘n’, ‘N’ or ‘0’, I/O is buffered. This is the default.


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3.6 GFORTRAN_UNBUFFERED_PRECONNECTED—Do not buffer I/O on preconnected units

The environment variable named GFORTRAN_UNBUFFERED_PRECONNECTED controls whether I/O on a preconnected unit (i.e. STDOUT or STDERR) is unbuffered. If the first letter is ‘y’, ‘Y’ or ‘1’, I/O is unbuffered. This will slow down small sequential reads and writes. If the first letter is ‘n’, ‘N’ or ‘0’, I/O is buffered. This is the default.


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3.7 GFORTRAN_SHOW_LOCUS—Show location for runtime errors

If the first letter is ‘y’, ‘Y’ or ‘1’, filename and line numbers for runtime errors are printed. If the first letter is ‘n’, ‘N’ or ‘0’, do not print filename and line numbers for runtime errors. The default is to print the location.


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3.8 GFORTRAN_OPTIONAL_PLUS—Print leading + where permitted

If the first letter is ‘y’, ‘Y’ or ‘1’, a plus sign is printed where permitted by the Fortran standard. If the first letter is ‘n’, ‘N’ or ‘0’, a plus sign is not printed in most cases. Default is not to print plus signs.


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3.9 GFORTRAN_DEFAULT_RECL—Default record length for new files

This environment variable specifies the default record length, in bytes, for files which are opened without a RECL tag in the OPEN statement. This must be a positive integer. The default value is 1073741824 bytes (1 GB).


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3.10 GFORTRAN_LIST_SEPARATOR—Separator for list output

This environment variable specifies the separator when writing list-directed output. It may contain any number of spaces and at most one comma. If you specify this on the command line, be sure to quote spaces, as in

$ GFORTRAN_LIST_SEPARATOR='  ,  ' ./a.out

when a.out is the compiled Fortran program that you want to run. Default is a single space.


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3.11 GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT—Set endianness for unformatted I/O

By setting the GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT variable, it is possible to change the representation of data for unformatted files. The syntax for the GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT variable is:

GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT: mode | mode ';' exception | exception ;
mode: 'native' | 'swap' | 'big_endian' | 'little_endian' ;
exception: mode ':' unit_list | unit_list ;
unit_list: unit_spec | unit_list unit_spec ;
unit_spec: INTEGER | INTEGER '-' INTEGER ;

The variable consists of an optional default mode, followed by a list of optional exceptions, which are separated by semicolons from the preceding default and each other. Each exception consists of a format and a comma-separated list of units. Valid values for the modes are the same as for the CONVERT specifier:

A missing mode for an exception is taken to mean BIG_ENDIAN. Examples of values for GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT are:

Setting the environment variables should be done on the command line or via the export command for sh-compatible shells and via setenv for csh-compatible shells.

Example for sh:

$ gfortran foo.f90
$ GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT='big_endian;native:10-20' ./a.out

Example code for csh:

% gfortran foo.f90
% setenv GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT 'big_endian;native:10-20'
% ./a.out

Using anything but the native representation for unformatted data carries a significant speed overhead. If speed in this area matters to you, it is best if you use this only for data that needs to be portable.

See CONVERT specifier, for an alternative way to specify the data representation for unformatted files. See Runtime Options, for setting a default data representation for the whole program. The CONVERT specifier overrides the -fconvert compile options.

Note that the values specified via the GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT environment variable will override the CONVERT specifier in the open statement. This is to give control over data formats to users who do not have the source code of their program available.


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3.12 GFORTRAN_ERROR_BACKTRACE—Show backtrace on run-time errors

If the GFORTRAN_ERROR_BACKTRACE variable is set to ‘y’, ‘Y’ or ‘1’ (only the first letter is relevant) then a backtrace is printed when a serious run-time error occurs. To disable the backtracing, set the variable to ‘n’, ‘N’, ‘0’. Default is to print a backtrace unless the -fno-backtrace compile option was used.


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4 Fortran 2003 and 2008 Status


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4.1 Fortran 2003 status

GNU Fortran supports several Fortran 2003 features; an incomplete list can be found below. See also the wiki page about Fortran 2003.


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4.2 Fortran 2008 status

The latest version of the Fortran standard is ISO/IEC 1539-1:2010, informally known as Fortran 2008. The official version is available from International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or its national member organizations. The the final draft (FDIS) can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.nag.co.uk/sc22wg5/links.html. Fortran is developed by the Working Group 5 of Sub-Committee 22 of the Joint Technical Committee 1 of the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). This group is known as WG5.

The GNU Fortran compiler supports several of the new features of Fortran 2008; the wiki has some information about the current Fortran 2008 implementation status. In particular, the following is implemented.


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4.3 Technical Specification 29113 Status

GNU Fortran supports some of the new features of the Technical Specification (TS) 29113 on Further Interoperability of Fortran with C. The wiki has some information about the current TS 29113 implementation status. In particular, the following is implemented.

See also Further Interoperability of Fortran with C.


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5 Compiler Characteristics

This chapter describes certain characteristics of the GNU Fortran compiler, that are not specified by the Fortran standard, but which might in some way or another become visible to the programmer.


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5.1 KIND Type Parameters

The KIND type parameters supported by GNU Fortran for the primitive data types are:

INTEGER

1, 2, 4, 8*, 16*, default: 4**

LOGICAL

1, 2, 4, 8*, 16*, default: 4**

REAL

4, 8, 10*, 16*, default: 4***

COMPLEX

4, 8, 10*, 16*, default: 4***

DOUBLE PRECISION

4, 8, 10*, 16*, default: 8***

CHARACTER

1, 4, default: 1

* not available on all systems
** unless -fdefault-integer-8 is used
*** unless -fdefault-real-8 is used (see Fortran Dialect Options)

The KIND value matches the storage size in bytes, except for COMPLEX where the storage size is twice as much (or both real and imaginary part are a real value of the given size). It is recommended to use the SELECTED_CHAR_KIND, SELECTED_INT_KIND and SELECTED_REAL_KIND intrinsics or the INT8, INT16, INT32, INT64, REAL32, REAL64, and REAL128 parameters of the ISO_FORTRAN_ENV module instead of the concrete values. The available kind parameters can be found in the constant arrays CHARACTER_KINDS, INTEGER_KINDS, LOGICAL_KINDS and REAL_KINDS in the ISO_FORTRAN_ENV module. For C interoperability, the kind parameters of the ISO_C_BINDING module should be used.


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5.2 Internal representation of LOGICAL variables

The Fortran standard does not specify how variables of LOGICAL type are represented, beyond requiring that LOGICAL variables of default kind have the same storage size as default INTEGER and REAL variables. The GNU Fortran internal representation is as follows.

A LOGICAL(KIND=N) variable is represented as an INTEGER(KIND=N) variable, however, with only two permissible values: 1 for .TRUE. and 0 for .FALSE.. Any other integer value results in undefined behavior.

See also Argument passing conventions and Interoperability with C.


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5.3 Thread-safety of the runtime library

GNU Fortran can be used in programs with multiple threads, e.g. by using OpenMP, by calling OS thread handling functions via the ISO_C_BINDING facility, or by GNU Fortran compiled library code being called from a multi-threaded program.

The GNU Fortran runtime library, (libgfortran), supports being called concurrently from multiple threads with the following exceptions.

During library initialization, the C getenv function is used, which need not be thread-safe. Similarly, the getenv function is used to implement the GET_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE and GETENV intrinsics. It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that the environment is not being updated concurrently when any of these actions are taking place.

The EXECUTE_COMMAND_LINE and SYSTEM intrinsics are implemented with the system function, which need not be thread-safe. It is the responsibility of the user to ensure that system is not called concurrently.

For platforms not supporting thread-safe POSIX functions, further functionality might not be thread-safe. For details, please consult the documentation for your operating system.

The GNU Fortran runtime library uses various C library functions that depend on the locale, such as strtod and snprintf. In order to work correctly in locale-aware programs that set the locale using setlocale, the locale is reset to the default “C” locale while executing a formatted READ or WRITE statement. On targets supporting the POSIX 2008 per-thread locale functions (e.g. newlocale, uselocale, freelocale), these are used and thus the global locale set using setlocale or the per-thread locales in other threads are not affected. However, on targets lacking this functionality, the global LC_NUMERIC locale is set to “C” during the formatted I/O. Thus, on such targets it’s not safe to call setlocale concurrently from another thread while a Fortran formatted I/O operation is in progress. Also, other threads doing something dependent on the LC_NUMERIC locale might not work correctly if a formatted I/O operation is in progress in another thread.


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5.4 Data consistency and durability

This section contains a brief overview of data and metadata consistency and durability issues when doing I/O.

With respect to durability, GNU Fortran makes no effort to ensure that data is committed to stable storage. If this is required, the GNU Fortran programmer can use the intrinsic FNUM to retrieve the low level file descriptor corresponding to an open Fortran unit. Then, using e.g. the ISO_C_BINDING feature, one can call the underlying system call to flush dirty data to stable storage, such as fsync on POSIX, _commit on MingW, or fcntl(fd, F_FULLSYNC, 0) on Mac OS X. The following example shows how to call fsync:

  ! Declare the interface for POSIX fsync function
  interface
    function fsync (fd) bind(c,name="fsync")
    use iso_c_binding, only: c_int
      integer(c_int), value :: fd
      integer(c_int) :: fsync
    end function fsync
  end interface

  ! Variable declaration
  integer :: ret

  ! Opening unit 10
  open (10,file="foo")

  ! ...
  ! Perform I/O on unit 10
  ! ...

  ! Flush and sync
  flush(10)
  ret = fsync(fnum(10))

  ! Handle possible error
  if (ret /= 0) stop "Error calling FSYNC"

With respect to consistency, for regular files GNU Fortran uses buffered I/O in order to improve performance. This buffer is flushed automatically when full and in some other situations, e.g. when closing a unit. It can also be explicitly flushed with the FLUSH statement. Also, the buffering can be turned off with the GFORTRAN_UNBUFFERED_ALL and GFORTRAN_UNBUFFERED_PRECONNECTED environment variables. Special files, such as terminals and pipes, are always unbuffered. Sometimes, however, further things may need to be done in order to allow other processes to see data that GNU Fortran has written, as follows.

The Windows platform supports a relaxed metadata consistency model, where file metadata is written to the directory lazily. This means that, for instance, the dir command can show a stale size for a file. One can force a directory metadata update by closing the unit, or by calling _commit on the file descriptor. Note, though, that _commit will force all dirty data to stable storage, which is often a very slow operation.

The Network File System (NFS) implements a relaxed consistency model called open-to-close consistency. Closing a file forces dirty data and metadata to be flushed to the server, and opening a file forces the client to contact the server in order to revalidate cached data. fsync will also force a flush of dirty data and metadata to the server. Similar to open and close, acquiring and releasing fcntl file locks, if the server supports them, will also force cache validation and flushing dirty data and metadata.


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5.5 Files opened without an explicit ACTION= specifier

The Fortran standard says that if an OPEN statement is executed without an explicit ACTION= specifier, the default value is processor dependent. GNU Fortran behaves as follows:

  1. Attempt to open the file with ACTION='READWRITE'
  2. If that fails, try to open with ACTION='READ'
  3. If that fails, try to open with ACTION='WRITE'
  4. If that fails, generate an error

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6 Extensions

The two sections below detail the extensions to standard Fortran that are implemented in GNU Fortran, as well as some of the popular or historically important extensions that are not (or not yet) implemented. For the latter case, we explain the alternatives available to GNU Fortran users, including replacement by standard-conforming code or GNU extensions.


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6.1 Extensions implemented in GNU Fortran

GNU Fortran implements a number of extensions over standard Fortran. This chapter contains information on their syntax and meaning. There are currently two categories of GNU Fortran extensions, those that provide functionality beyond that provided by any standard, and those that are supported by GNU Fortran purely for backward compatibility with legacy compilers. By default, -std=gnu allows the compiler to accept both types of extensions, but to warn about the use of the latter. Specifying either -std=f95, -std=f2003 or -std=f2008 disables both types of extensions, and -std=legacy allows both without warning.


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6.1.1 Old-style kind specifications

GNU Fortran allows old-style kind specifications in declarations. These look like:

      TYPESPEC*size x,y,z

where TYPESPEC is a basic type (INTEGER, REAL, etc.), and where size is a byte count corresponding to the storage size of a valid kind for that type. (For COMPLEX variables, size is the total size of the real and imaginary parts.) The statement then declares x, y and z to be of type TYPESPEC with the appropriate kind. This is equivalent to the standard-conforming declaration

      TYPESPEC(k) x,y,z

where k is the kind parameter suitable for the intended precision. As kind parameters are implementation-dependent, use the KIND, SELECTED_INT_KIND and SELECTED_REAL_KIND intrinsics to retrieve the correct value, for instance REAL*8 x can be replaced by:

INTEGER, PARAMETER :: dbl = KIND(1.0d0)
REAL(KIND=dbl) :: x

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6.1.2 Old-style variable initialization

GNU Fortran allows old-style initialization of variables of the form:

      INTEGER i/1/,j/2/
      REAL x(2,2) /3*0.,1./

The syntax for the initializers is as for the DATA statement, but unlike in a DATA statement, an initializer only applies to the variable immediately preceding the initialization. In other words, something like INTEGER I,J/2,3/ is not valid. This style of initialization is only allowed in declarations without double colons (::); the double colons were introduced in Fortran 90, which also introduced a standard syntax for initializing variables in type declarations.

Examples of standard-conforming code equivalent to the above example are:

! Fortran 90
      INTEGER :: i = 1, j = 2
      REAL :: x(2,2) = RESHAPE((/0.,0.,0.,1./),SHAPE(x))
! Fortran 77
      INTEGER i, j
      REAL x(2,2)
      DATA i/1/, j/2/, x/3*0.,1./

Note that variables which are explicitly initialized in declarations or in DATA statements automatically acquire the SAVE attribute.


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6.1.3 Extensions to namelist

GNU Fortran fully supports the Fortran 95 standard for namelist I/O including array qualifiers, substrings and fully qualified derived types. The output from a namelist write is compatible with namelist read. The output has all names in upper case and indentation to column 1 after the namelist name. Two extensions are permitted:

Old-style use of ‘$’ instead of ‘&

$MYNML
 X(:)%Y(2) = 1.0 2.0 3.0
 CH(1:4) = "abcd"
$END

It should be noted that the default terminator is ‘/’ rather than ‘&END’.

Querying of the namelist when inputting from stdin. After at least one space, entering ‘?’ sends to stdout the namelist name and the names of the variables in the namelist:

 ?

&mynml
 x
 x%y
 ch
&end

Entering ‘=?’ outputs the namelist to stdout, as if WRITE(*,NML = mynml) had been called:

=?

&MYNML
 X(1)%Y=  0.000000    ,  1.000000    ,  0.000000    ,
 X(2)%Y=  0.000000    ,  2.000000    ,  0.000000    ,
 X(3)%Y=  0.000000    ,  3.000000    ,  0.000000    ,
 CH=abcd,  /

To aid this dialog, when input is from stdin, errors send their messages to stderr and execution continues, even if IOSTAT is set.

PRINT namelist is permitted. This causes an error if -std=f95 is used.

PROGRAM test_print
  REAL, dimension (4)  ::  x = (/1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0/)
  NAMELIST /mynml/ x
  PRINT mynml
END PROGRAM test_print

Expanded namelist reads are permitted. This causes an error if -std=f95 is used. In the following example, the first element of the array will be given the value 0.00 and the two succeeding elements will be given the values 1.00 and 2.00.

&MYNML
  X(1,1) = 0.00 , 1.00 , 2.00
/

When writing a namelist, if no DELIM= is specified, by default a double quote is used to delimit character strings. If -std=F95, F2003, or F2008, etc, the delim status is set to ’none’. Defaulting to quotes ensures that namelists with character strings can be subsequently read back in accurately.


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6.1.4 X format descriptor without count field

To support legacy codes, GNU Fortran permits the count field of the X edit descriptor in FORMAT statements to be omitted. When omitted, the count is implicitly assumed to be one.

       PRINT 10, 2, 3
10     FORMAT (I1, X, I1)

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6.1.5 Commas in FORMAT specifications

To support legacy codes, GNU Fortran allows the comma separator to be omitted immediately before and after character string edit descriptors in FORMAT statements.

       PRINT 10, 2, 3
10     FORMAT ('FOO='I1' BAR='I2)

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6.1.6 Missing period in FORMAT specifications

To support legacy codes, GNU Fortran allows missing periods in format specifications if and only if -std=legacy is given on the command line. This is considered non-conforming code and is discouraged.

       REAL :: value
       READ(*,10) value
10     FORMAT ('F4')

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6.1.7 I/O item lists

To support legacy codes, GNU Fortran allows the input item list of the READ statement, and the output item lists of the WRITE and PRINT statements, to start with a comma.


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6.1.8 Q exponent-letter

GNU Fortran accepts real literal constants with an exponent-letter of Q, for example, 1.23Q45. The constant is interpreted as a REAL(16) entity on targets that support this type. If the target does not support REAL(16) but has a REAL(10) type, then the real-literal-constant will be interpreted as a REAL(10) entity. In the absence of REAL(16) and REAL(10), an error will occur.


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6.1.9 BOZ literal constants

Besides decimal constants, Fortran also supports binary (b), octal (o) and hexadecimal (z) integer constants. The syntax is: ‘prefix quote digits quote’, were the prefix is either b, o or z, quote is either ' or " and the digits are for binary 0 or 1, for octal between 0 and 7, and for hexadecimal between 0 and F. (Example: b'01011101'.)

Up to Fortran 95, BOZ literals were only allowed to initialize integer variables in DATA statements. Since Fortran 2003 BOZ literals are also allowed as argument of REAL, DBLE, INT and CMPLX; the result is the same as if the integer BOZ literal had been converted by TRANSFER to, respectively, real, double precision, integer or complex. As GNU Fortran extension the intrinsic procedures FLOAT, DFLOAT, COMPLEX and DCMPLX are treated alike.

As an extension, GNU Fortran allows hexadecimal BOZ literal constants to be specified using the X prefix, in addition to the standard Z prefix. The BOZ literal can also be specified by adding a suffix to the string, for example, Z'ABC' and 'ABC'Z are equivalent.

Furthermore, GNU Fortran allows using BOZ literal constants outside DATA statements and the four intrinsic functions allowed by Fortran 2003. In DATA statements, in direct assignments, where the right-hand side only contains a BOZ literal constant, and for old-style initializers of the form integer i /o'0173'/, the constant is transferred as if TRANSFER had been used; for COMPLEX numbers, only the real part is initialized unless CMPLX is used. In all other cases, the BOZ literal constant is converted to an INTEGER value with the largest decimal representation. This value is then converted numerically to the type and kind of the variable in question. (For instance, real :: r = b'0000001' + 1 initializes r with 2.0.) As different compilers implement the extension differently, one should be careful when doing bitwise initialization of non-integer variables.

Note that initializing an INTEGER variable with a statement such as DATA i/Z'FFFFFFFF'/ will give an integer overflow error rather than the desired result of -1 when i is a 32-bit integer on a system that supports 64-bit integers. The ‘-fno-range-check’ option can be used as a workaround for legacy code that initializes integers in this manner.


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6.1.10 Real array indices

As an extension, GNU Fortran allows the use of REAL expressions or variables as array indices.


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6.1.11 Unary operators

As an extension, GNU Fortran allows unary plus and unary minus operators to appear as the second operand of binary arithmetic operators without the need for parenthesis.

       X = Y * -Z

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6.1.12 Implicitly convert LOGICAL and INTEGER values

As an extension for backwards compatibility with other compilers, GNU Fortran allows the implicit conversion of LOGICAL values to INTEGER values and vice versa. When converting from a LOGICAL to an INTEGER, .FALSE. is interpreted as zero, and .TRUE. is interpreted as one. When converting from INTEGER to LOGICAL, the value zero is interpreted as .FALSE. and any nonzero value is interpreted as .TRUE..

        LOGICAL :: l
        l = 1
        INTEGER :: i
        i = .TRUE.

However, there is no implicit conversion of INTEGER values in if-statements, nor of LOGICAL or INTEGER values in I/O operations.


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6.1.13 Hollerith constants support

GNU Fortran supports Hollerith constants in assignments, function arguments, and DATA and ASSIGN statements. A Hollerith constant is written as a string of characters preceded by an integer constant indicating the character count, and the letter H or h, and stored in bytewise fashion in a numeric (INTEGER, REAL, or complex) or LOGICAL variable. The constant will be padded or truncated to fit the size of the variable in which it is stored.

Examples of valid uses of Hollerith constants:

      complex*16 x(2)
      data x /16Habcdefghijklmnop, 16Hqrstuvwxyz012345/
      x(1) = 16HABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP
      call foo (4h abc)

Invalid Hollerith constants examples:

      integer*4 a
      a = 8H12345678 ! Valid, but the Hollerith constant will be truncated.
      a = 0H         ! At least one character is needed.

In general, Hollerith constants were used to provide a rudimentary facility for handling character strings in early Fortran compilers, prior to the introduction of CHARACTER variables in Fortran 77; in those cases, the standard-compliant equivalent is to convert the program to use proper character strings. On occasion, there may be a case where the intent is specifically to initialize a numeric variable with a given byte sequence. In these cases, the same result can be obtained by using the TRANSFER statement, as in this example.

      INTEGER(KIND=4) :: a
      a = TRANSFER ("abcd", a)     ! equivalent to: a = 4Habcd

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6.1.14 Cray pointers

Cray pointers are part of a non-standard extension that provides a C-like pointer in Fortran. This is accomplished through a pair of variables: an integer "pointer" that holds a memory address, and a "pointee" that is used to dereference the pointer.

Pointer/pointee pairs are declared in statements of the form:

        pointer ( <pointer> , <pointee> )

or,

        pointer ( <pointer1> , <pointee1> ), ( <pointer2> , <pointee2> ), ...

The pointer is an integer that is intended to hold a memory address. The pointee may be an array or scalar. A pointee can be an assumed size array—that is, the last dimension may be left unspecified by using a * in place of a value—but a pointee cannot be an assumed shape array. No space is allocated for the pointee.

The pointee may have its type declared before or after the pointer statement, and its array specification (if any) may be declared before, during, or after the pointer statement. The pointer may be declared as an integer prior to the pointer statement. However, some machines have default integer sizes that are different than the size of a pointer, and so the following code is not portable:

        integer ipt
        pointer (ipt, iarr)

If a pointer is declared with a kind that is too small, the compiler will issue a warning; the resulting binary will probably not work correctly, because the memory addresses stored in the pointers may be truncated. It is safer to omit the first line of the above example; if explicit declaration of ipt’s type is omitted, then the compiler will ensure that ipt is an integer variable large enough to hold a pointer.

Pointer arithmetic is valid with Cray pointers, but it is not the same as C pointer arithmetic. Cray pointers are just ordinary integers, so the user is responsible for determining how many bytes to add to a pointer in order to increment it. Consider the following example:

        real target(10)
        real pointee(10)
        pointer (ipt, pointee)
        ipt = loc (target)
        ipt = ipt + 1       

The last statement does not set ipt to the address of target(1), as it would in C pointer arithmetic. Adding 1 to ipt just adds one byte to the address stored in ipt.

Any expression involving the pointee will be translated to use the value stored in the pointer as the base address.

To get the address of elements, this extension provides an intrinsic function LOC(). The LOC() function is equivalent to the & operator in C, except the address is cast to an integer type:

        real ar(10)
        pointer(ipt, arpte(10))
        real arpte
        ipt = loc(ar)  ! Makes arpte is an alias for ar
        arpte(1) = 1.0 ! Sets ar(1) to 1.0

The pointer can also be set by a call to the MALLOC intrinsic (see MALLOC).

Cray pointees often are used to alias an existing variable. For example:

        integer target(10)
        integer iarr(10)
        pointer (ipt, iarr)
        ipt = loc(target)

As long as ipt remains unchanged, iarr is now an alias for target. The optimizer, however, will not detect this aliasing, so it is unsafe to use iarr and target simultaneously. Using a pointee in any way that violates the Fortran aliasing rules or assumptions is illegal. It is the user’s responsibility to avoid doing this; the compiler works under the assumption that no such aliasing occurs.

Cray pointers will work correctly when there is no aliasing (i.e., when they are used to access a dynamically allocated block of memory), and also in any routine where a pointee is used, but any variable with which it shares storage is not used. Code that violates these rules may not run as the user intends. This is not a bug in the optimizer; any code that violates the aliasing rules is illegal. (Note that this is not unique to GNU Fortran; any Fortran compiler that supports Cray pointers will “incorrectly” optimize code with illegal aliasing.)

There are a number of restrictions on the attributes that can be applied to Cray pointers and pointees. Pointees may not have the ALLOCATABLE, INTENT, OPTIONAL, DUMMY, TARGET, INTRINSIC, or POINTER attributes. Pointers may not have the DIMENSION, POINTER, TARGET, ALLOCATABLE, EXTERNAL, or INTRINSIC attributes, nor may they be function results. Pointees may not occur in more than one pointer statement. A pointee cannot be a pointer. Pointees cannot occur in equivalence, common, or data statements.

A Cray pointer may also point to a function or a subroutine. For example, the following excerpt is valid:

  implicit none
  external sub
  pointer (subptr,subpte)
  external subpte
  subptr = loc(sub)
  call subpte()
  [...]
  subroutine sub
  [...]
  end subroutine sub

A pointer may be modified during the course of a program, and this will change the location to which the pointee refers. However, when pointees are passed as arguments, they are treated as ordinary variables in the invoked function. Subsequent changes to the pointer will not change the base address of the array that was passed.


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6.1.15 CONVERT specifier

GNU Fortran allows the conversion of unformatted data between little- and big-endian representation to facilitate moving of data between different systems. The conversion can be indicated with the CONVERT specifier on the OPEN statement. See GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT, for an alternative way of specifying the data format via an environment variable.

Valid values for CONVERT are:

Using the option could look like this:

  open(file='big.dat',form='unformatted',access='sequential', &
       convert='big_endian')

The value of the conversion can be queried by using INQUIRE(CONVERT=ch). The values returned are 'BIG_ENDIAN' and 'LITTLE_ENDIAN'.

CONVERT works between big- and little-endian for INTEGER values of all supported kinds and for REAL on IEEE systems of kinds 4 and 8. Conversion between different “extended double” types on different architectures such as m68k and x86_64, which GNU Fortran supports as REAL(KIND=10) and REAL(KIND=16), will probably not work.

Note that the values specified via the GFORTRAN_CONVERT_UNIT environment variable will override the CONVERT specifier in the open statement. This is to give control over data formats to users who do not have the source code of their program available.

Using anything but the native representation for unformatted data carries a significant speed overhead. If speed in this area matters to you, it is best if you use this only for data that needs to be portable.


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6.1.16 OpenMP

OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming in C/C++ and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.

GNU Fortran strives to be compatible to the OpenMP Application Program Interface v4.0.

To enable the processing of the OpenMP directive !$omp in free-form source code; the c$omp, *$omp and !$omp directives in fixed form; the !$ conditional compilation sentinels in free form; and the c$, *$ and !$ sentinels in fixed form, gfortran needs to be invoked with the -fopenmp. This also arranges for automatic linking of the GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library libgomp in GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library.

The OpenMP Fortran runtime library routines are provided both in a form of a Fortran 90 module named omp_lib and in a form of a Fortran include file named omp_lib.h.

An example of a parallelized loop taken from Appendix A.1 of the OpenMP Application Program Interface v2.5:

SUBROUTINE A1(N, A, B)
  INTEGER I, N
  REAL B(N), A(N)
!$OMP PARALLEL DO !I is private by default
  DO I=2,N
    B(I) = (A(I) + A(I-1)) / 2.0
  ENDDO
!$OMP END PARALLEL DO
END SUBROUTINE A1

Please note:


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6.1.17 OpenACC

OpenACC is an application programming interface (API) that supports offloading of code to accelerator devices. It consists of a set of compiler directives, library routines, and environment variables that influence run-time behavior.

GNU Fortran strives to be compatible to the OpenACC Application Programming Interface v2.0.

To enable the processing of the OpenACC directive !$acc in free-form source code; the c$acc, *$acc and !$acc directives in fixed form; the !$ conditional compilation sentinels in free form; and the c$, *$ and !$ sentinels in fixed form, gfortran needs to be invoked with the -fopenacc. This also arranges for automatic linking of the GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library libgomp in GNU Offloading and Multi Processing Runtime Library.

The OpenACC Fortran runtime library routines are provided both in a form of a Fortran 90 module named openacc and in a form of a Fortran include file named openacc_lib.h.

Note that this is an experimental feature, incomplete, and subject to change in future versions of GCC. See https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/OpenACC for more information.


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6.1.18 Argument list functions %VAL, %REF and %LOC

GNU Fortran supports argument list functions %VAL, %REF and %LOC statements, for backward compatibility with g77. It is recommended that these should be used only for code that is accessing facilities outside of GNU Fortran, such as operating system or windowing facilities. It is best to constrain such uses to isolated portions of a program–portions that deal specifically and exclusively with low-level, system-dependent facilities. Such portions might well provide a portable interface for use by the program as a whole, but are themselves not portable, and should be thoroughly tested each time they are rebuilt using a new compiler or version of a compiler.

%VAL passes a scalar argument by value, %REF passes it by reference and %LOC passes its memory location. Since gfortran already passes scalar arguments by reference, %REF is in effect a do-nothing. %LOC has the same effect as a Fortran pointer.

An example of passing an argument by value to a C subroutine foo.:

C
C prototype      void foo_ (float x);
C
      external foo
      real*4 x
      x = 3.14159
      call foo (%VAL (x))
      end

For details refer to the g77 manual https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.6/g77/index.html#Top.

Also, c_by_val.f and its partner c_by_val.c of the GNU Fortran testsuite are worth a look.


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6.1.19 Read/Write after EOF marker

Some legacy codes rely on allowing READ or WRITE after the EOF file marker in order to find the end of a file. GNU Fortran normally rejects these codes with a run-time error message and suggests the user consider BACKSPACE or REWIND to properly position the file before the EOF marker. As an extension, the run-time error may be disabled using -std=legacy.


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6.2 Extensions not implemented in GNU Fortran

The long history of the Fortran language, its wide use and broad userbase, the large number of different compiler vendors and the lack of some features crucial to users in the first standards have lead to the existence of a number of important extensions to the language. While some of the most useful or popular extensions are supported by the GNU Fortran compiler, not all existing extensions are supported. This section aims at listing these extensions and offering advice on how best make code that uses them running with the GNU Fortran compiler.


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6.2.1 STRUCTURE and RECORD

Record structures are a pre-Fortran-90 vendor extension to create user-defined aggregate data types. GNU Fortran does not support record structures, only Fortran 90’s “derived types”, which have a different syntax.

In many cases, record structures can easily be converted to derived types. To convert, replace STRUCTURE /structure-name/ by TYPE type-name. Additionally, replace RECORD /structure-name/ by TYPE(type-name). Finally, in the component access, replace the period (.) by the percent sign (%).

Here is an example of code using the non portable record structure syntax:

! Declaring a structure named ``item'' and containing three fields:
! an integer ID, an description string and a floating-point price.
STRUCTURE /item/
  INTEGER id
  CHARACTER(LEN=200) description
  REAL price
END STRUCTURE

! Define two variables, an single record of type ``item''
! named ``pear'', and an array of items named ``store_catalog''
RECORD /item/ pear, store_catalog(100)

! We can directly access the fields of both variables
pear.id = 92316
pear.description = "juicy D'Anjou pear"
pear.price = 0.15
store_catalog(7).id = 7831
store_catalog(7).description = "milk bottle"
store_catalog(7).price = 1.2

! We can also manipulate the whole structure
store_catalog(12) = pear
print *, store_catalog(12)

This code can easily be rewritten in the Fortran 90 syntax as following:

! ``STRUCTURE /name/ ... END STRUCTURE'' becomes
! ``TYPE name ... END TYPE''
TYPE item
  INTEGER id
  CHARACTER(LEN=200) description
  REAL price
END TYPE

! ``RECORD /name/ variable'' becomes ``TYPE(name) variable''
TYPE(item) pear, store_catalog(100)

! Instead of using a dot (.) to access fields of a record, the
! standard syntax uses a percent sign (%)
pear%id = 92316
pear%description = "juicy D'Anjou pear"
pear%price = 0.15
store_catalog(7)%id = 7831
store_catalog(7)%description = "milk bottle"
store_catalog(7)%price = 1.2

! Assignments of a whole variable do not change
store_catalog(12) = pear
print *, store_catalog(12)

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6.2.2 ENCODE and DECODE statements

GNU Fortran does not support the ENCODE and DECODE statements. These statements are best replaced by READ and WRITE statements involving internal files (CHARACTER variables and arrays), which have been part of the Fortran standard since Fortran 77. For example, replace a code fragment like

      INTEGER*1 LINE(80)
      REAL A, B, C
c     ... Code that sets LINE
      DECODE (80, 9000, LINE) A, B, C
 9000 FORMAT (1X, 3(F10.5))

with the following:

      CHARACTER(LEN=80) LINE
      REAL A, B, C
c     ... Code that sets LINE
      READ (UNIT=LINE, FMT=9000) A, B, C
 9000 FORMAT (1X, 3(F10.5))

Similarly, replace a code fragment like

      INTEGER*1 LINE(80)
      REAL A, B, C
c     ... Code that sets A, B and C
      ENCODE (80, 9000, LINE) A, B, C
 9000 FORMAT (1X, 'OUTPUT IS ', 3(F10.5))

with the following:

      CHARACTER(LEN=80) LINE
      REAL A, B, C
c     ... Code that sets A, B and C
      WRITE (UNIT=LINE, FMT=9000) A, B, C
 9000 FORMAT (1X, 'OUTPUT IS ', 3(F10.5))

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6.2.3 Variable FORMAT expressions

A variable FORMAT expression is format statement which includes angle brackets enclosing a Fortran expression: FORMAT(I<N>). GNU Fortran does not support this legacy extension. The effect of variable format expressions can be reproduced by using the more powerful (and standard) combination of internal output and string formats. For example, replace a code fragment like this:

      WRITE(6,20) INT1
 20   FORMAT(I<N+1>)

with the following:

c     Variable declaration
      CHARACTER(LEN=20) FMT
c     
c     Other code here...
c
      WRITE(FMT,'("(I", I0, ")")') N+1
      WRITE(6,FMT) INT1

or with:

c     Variable declaration
      CHARACTER(LEN=20) FMT
c     
c     Other code here...
c
      WRITE(FMT,*) N+1
      WRITE(6,"(I" // ADJUSTL(FMT) // ")") INT1

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6.2.4 Alternate complex function syntax

Some Fortran compilers, including g77, let the user declare complex functions with the syntax COMPLEX FUNCTION name*16(), as well as COMPLEX*16 FUNCTION name(). Both are non-standard, legacy extensions. gfortran accepts the latter form, which is more common, but not the former.


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6.2.5 Volatile COMMON blocks

Some Fortran compilers, including g77, let the user declare COMMON with the VOLATILE attribute. This is invalid standard Fortran syntax and is not supported by gfortran. Note that gfortran accepts VOLATILE variables in COMMON blocks since revision 4.3.


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7 Mixed-Language Programming

This chapter is about mixed-language interoperability, but also applies if one links Fortran code compiled by different compilers. In most cases, use of the C Binding features of the Fortran 2003 standard is sufficient, and their use is highly recommended.


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7.1 Interoperability with C

Since Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC 1539-1:2004(E)) there is a standardized way to generate procedure and derived-type declarations and global variables which are interoperable with C (ISO/IEC 9899:1999). The bind(C) attribute has been added to inform the compiler that a symbol shall be interoperable with C; also, some constraints are added. Note, however, that not all C features have a Fortran equivalent or vice versa. For instance, neither C’s unsigned integers nor C’s functions with variable number of arguments have an equivalent in Fortran.

Note that array dimensions are reversely ordered in C and that arrays in C always start with index 0 while in Fortran they start by default with 1. Thus, an array declaration A(n,m) in Fortran matches A[m][n] in C and accessing the element A(i,j) matches A[j-1][i-1]. The element following A(i,j) (C: A[j-1][i-1]; assuming i < n) in memory is A(i+1,j) (C: A[j-1][i]).


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7.1.1 Intrinsic Types

In order to ensure that exactly the same variable type and kind is used in C and Fortran, the named constants shall be used which are defined in the ISO_C_BINDING intrinsic module. That module contains named constants for kind parameters and character named constants for the escape sequences in C. For a list of the constants, see ISO_C_BINDING.

For logical types, please note that the Fortran standard only guarantees interoperability between C99’s _Bool and Fortran’s C_Bool-kind logicals and C99 defines that true has the value 1 and false the value 0. Using any other integer value with GNU Fortran’s LOGICAL (with any kind parameter) gives an undefined result. (Passing other integer values than 0 and 1 to GCC’s _Bool is also undefined, unless the integer is explicitly or implicitly casted to _Bool.)


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7.1.2 Derived Types and struct

For compatibility of derived types with struct, one needs to use the BIND(C) attribute in the type declaration. For instance, the following type declaration

 USE ISO_C_BINDING
 TYPE, BIND(C) :: myType
   INTEGER(C_INT) :: i1, i2
   INTEGER(C_SIGNED_CHAR) :: i3
   REAL(C_DOUBLE) :: d1
   COMPLEX(C_FLOAT_COMPLEX) :: c1
   CHARACTER(KIND=C_CHAR) :: str(5)
 END TYPE

matches the following struct declaration in C

 struct {
   int i1, i2;
   /* Note: "char" might be signed or unsigned.  */
   signed char i3;
   double d1;
   float _Complex c1;
   char str[5];
 } myType;

Derived types with the C binding attribute shall not have the sequence attribute, type parameters, the extends attribute, nor type-bound procedures. Every component must be of interoperable type and kind and may not have the pointer or allocatable attribute. The names of the components are irrelevant for interoperability.

As there exist no direct Fortran equivalents, neither unions nor structs with bit field or variable-length array members are interoperable.


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7.1.3 Interoperable Global Variables

Variables can be made accessible from C using the C binding attribute, optionally together with specifying a binding name. Those variables have to be declared in the declaration part of a MODULE, be of interoperable type, and have neither the pointer nor the allocatable attribute.

  MODULE m
    USE myType_module
    USE ISO_C_BINDING
    integer(C_INT), bind(C, name="_MyProject_flags") :: global_flag
    type(myType), bind(C) :: tp
  END MODULE

Here, _MyProject_flags is the case-sensitive name of the variable as seen from C programs while global_flag is the case-insensitive name as seen from Fortran. If no binding name is specified, as for tp, the C binding name is the (lowercase) Fortran binding name. If a binding name is specified, only a single variable may be after the double colon. Note of warning: You cannot use a global variable to access errno of the C library as the C standard allows it to be a macro. Use the IERRNO intrinsic (GNU extension) instead.


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7.1.4 Interoperable Subroutines and Functions

Subroutines and functions have to have the BIND(C) attribute to be compatible with C. The dummy argument declaration is relatively straightforward. However, one needs to be careful because C uses call-by-value by default while Fortran behaves usually similar to call-by-reference. Furthermore, strings and pointers are handled differently. Note that in Fortran 2003 and 2008 only explicit size and assumed-size arrays are supported but not assumed-shape or deferred-shape (i.e. allocatable or pointer) arrays. However, those are allowed since the Technical Specification 29113, see Further Interoperability of Fortran with C

To pass a variable by value, use the VALUE attribute. Thus, the following C prototype

int func(int i, int *j)

matches the Fortran declaration

  integer(c_int) function func(i,j)
    use iso_c_binding, only: c_int
    integer(c_int), VALUE :: i
    integer(c_int) :: j

Note that pointer arguments also frequently need the VALUE attribute, see Working with Pointers.

Strings are handled quite differently in C and Fortran. In C a string is a NUL-terminated array of characters while in Fortran each string has a length associated with it and is thus not terminated (by e.g. NUL). For example, if one wants to use the following C function,

  #include <stdio.h>
  void print_C(char *string) /* equivalent: char string[]  */
  {
     printf("%s\n", string);
  }

to print “Hello World” from Fortran, one can call it using

  use iso_c_binding, only: C_CHAR, C_NULL_CHAR
  interface
    subroutine print_c(string) bind(C, name="print_C")
      use iso_c_binding, only: c_char
      character(kind=c_char) :: string(*)
    end subroutine print_c
  end interface
  call print_c(C_CHAR_"Hello World"//C_NULL_CHAR)

As the example shows, one needs to ensure that the string is NUL terminated. Additionally, the dummy argument string of print_C is a length-one assumed-size array; using character(len=*) is not allowed. The example above uses c_char_"Hello World" to ensure the string literal has the right type; typically the default character kind and c_char are the same and thus "Hello World" is equivalent. However, the standard does not guarantee this.

The use of strings is now further illustrated using the C library function strncpy, whose prototype is

  char *strncpy(char *restrict s1, const char *restrict s2, size_t n);

The function strncpy copies at most n characters from string s2 to s1 and returns s1. In the following example, we ignore the return value:

  use iso_c_binding
  implicit none
  character(len=30) :: str,str2
  interface
    ! Ignore the return value of strncpy -> subroutine
    ! "restrict" is always assumed if we do not pass a pointer
    subroutine strncpy(dest, src, n) bind(C)
      import
      character(kind=c_char),  intent(out) :: dest(*)
      character(kind=c_char),  intent(in)  :: src(*)
      integer(c_size_t), value, intent(in) :: n
    end subroutine strncpy
  end interface
  str = repeat('X',30) ! Initialize whole string with 'X'
  call strncpy(str, c_char_"Hello World"//C_NULL_CHAR, &
               len(c_char_"Hello World",kind=c_size_t))
  print '(a)', str ! prints: "Hello WorldXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
  end

The intrinsic procedures are described in Intrinsic Procedures.


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7.1.5 Working with Pointers

C pointers are represented in Fortran via the special opaque derived type type(c_ptr) (with private components). Thus one needs to use intrinsic conversion procedures to convert from or to C pointers.

For some applications, using an assumed type (TYPE(*)) can be an alternative to a C pointer; see Further Interoperability of Fortran with C.

For example,

  use iso_c_binding
  type(c_ptr) :: cptr1, cptr2
  integer, target :: array(7), scalar
  integer, pointer :: pa(:), ps
  cptr1 = c_loc(array(1)) ! The programmer needs to ensure that the
                          ! array is contiguous if required by the C
                          ! procedure
  cptr2 = c_loc(scalar)
  call c_f_pointer(cptr2, ps)
  call c_f_pointer(cptr2, pa, shape=[7])

When converting C to Fortran arrays, the one-dimensional SHAPE argument has to be passed.

If a pointer is a dummy-argument of an interoperable procedure, it usually has to be declared using the VALUE attribute. void* matches TYPE(C_PTR), VALUE, while TYPE(C_PTR) alone matches void**.

Procedure pointers are handled analogously to pointers; the C type is TYPE(C_FUNPTR) and the intrinsic conversion procedures are C_F_PROCPOINTER and C_FUNLOC.

Let us consider two examples of actually passing a procedure pointer from C to Fortran and vice versa. Note that these examples are also very similar to passing ordinary pointers between both languages. First, consider this code in C:

/* Procedure implemented in Fortran.  */
void get_values (void (*)(double));

/* Call-back routine we want called from Fortran.  */
void
print_it (double x)
{
  printf ("Number is %f.\n", x);
}

/* Call Fortran routine and pass call-back to it.  */
void
foobar ()
{
  get_values (&print_it);
}

A matching implementation for get_values in Fortran, that correctly receives the procedure pointer from C and is able to call it, is given in the following MODULE:

MODULE m
  IMPLICIT NONE

  ! Define interface of call-back routine.
  ABSTRACT INTERFACE
    SUBROUTINE callback (x)
      USE, INTRINSIC :: ISO_C_BINDING
      REAL(KIND=C_DOUBLE), INTENT(IN), VALUE :: x
    END SUBROUTINE callback
  END INTERFACE

CONTAINS

  ! Define C-bound procedure.
  SUBROUTINE get_values (cproc) BIND(C)
    USE, INTRINSIC :: ISO_C_BINDING
    TYPE(C_FUNPTR), INTENT(IN), VALUE :: cproc

    PROCEDURE(callback), POINTER :: proc

    ! Convert C to Fortran procedure pointer.
    CALL C_F_PROCPOINTER (cproc, proc)

    ! Call it.
    CALL proc (1.0_C_DOUBLE)
    CALL proc (-42.0_C_DOUBLE)
    CALL proc (18.12_C_DOUBLE)
  END SUBROUTINE get_values

END MODULE m

Next, we want to call a C routine that expects a procedure pointer argument and pass it a Fortran procedure (which clearly must be interoperable!). Again, the C function may be:

int
call_it (int (*func)(int), int arg)
{
  return func (arg);
}

It can be used as in the following Fortran code:

MODULE m
  USE, INTRINSIC :: ISO_C_BINDING
  IMPLICIT NONE

  ! Define interface of C function.
  INTERFACE
    INTEGER(KIND=C_INT) FUNCTION call_it (func, arg) BIND(C)
      USE, INTRINSIC :: ISO_C_BINDING
      TYPE(C_FUNPTR), INTENT(IN), VALUE :: func
      INTEGER(KIND=C_INT), INTENT(IN), VALUE :: arg
    END FUNCTION call_it
  END INTERFACE

CONTAINS

  ! Define procedure passed to C function.
  ! It must be interoperable!
  INTEGER(KIND=C_INT) FUNCTION double_it (arg) BIND(C)
    INTEGER(KIND=C_INT), INTENT(IN), VALUE :: arg
    double_it = arg + arg
  END FUNCTION double_it

  ! Call C function.
  SUBROUTINE foobar ()
    TYPE(C_FUNPTR) :: cproc
    INTEGER(KIND=C_INT) :: i

    ! Get C procedure pointer.
    cproc = C_FUNLOC (double_it)

    ! Use it.
    DO i = 1_C_INT, 10_C_INT
      PRINT *, call_it (cproc, i)
    END DO
  END SUBROUTINE foobar

END MODULE m

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7.1.6 Further Interoperability of Fortran with C

The Technical Specification ISO/IEC TS 29113:2012 on further interoperability of Fortran with C extends the interoperability support of Fortran 2003 and Fortran 2008. Besides removing some restrictions and constraints, it adds assumed-type (TYPE(*)) and assumed-rank (dimension) variables and allows for interoperability of assumed-shape, assumed-rank and deferred-shape arrays, including allocatables and pointers.

Note: Currently, GNU Fortran does not support the array descriptor (dope vector) as specified in the Technical Specification, but uses an array descriptor with different fields. The Chasm Language Interoperability Tools, http://chasm-interop.sourceforge.net/, provide an interface to GNU Fortran’s array descriptor.

The Technical Specification adds the following new features, which are supported by GNU Fortran:

Currently unimplemented:


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7.2 GNU Fortran Compiler Directives

The Fortran standard describes how a conforming program shall behave; however, the exact implementation is not standardized. In order to allow the user to choose specific implementation details, compiler directives can be used to set attributes of variables and procedures which are not part of the standard. Whether a given attribute is supported and its exact effects depend on both the operating system and on the processor; see C Extensions in Using the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for details.

For procedures and procedure pointers, the following attributes can be used to change the calling convention:

Besides changing the calling convention, the attributes also influence the decoration of the symbol name, e.g., by a leading underscore or by a trailing at-sign followed by the number of bytes on the stack. When assigning a procedure to a procedure pointer, both should use the same calling convention.

On some systems, procedures and global variables (module variables and COMMON blocks) need special handling to be accessible when they are in a shared library. The following attributes are available:

For dummy arguments, the NO_ARG_CHECK attribute can be used; in other compilers, it is also known as IGNORE_TKR. For dummy arguments with this attribute actual arguments of any type and kind (similar to TYPE(*)), scalars and arrays of any rank (no equivalent in Fortran standard) are accepted. As with TYPE(*), the argument is unlimited polymorphic and no type information is available. Additionally, the argument may only be passed to dummy arguments with the NO_ARG_CHECK attribute and as argument to the PRESENT intrinsic function and to C_LOC of the ISO_C_BINDING module.

Variables with NO_ARG_CHECK attribute shall be of assumed-type (TYPE(*); recommended) or of type INTEGER, LOGICAL, REAL or COMPLEX. They shall not have the ALLOCATE, CODIMENSION, INTENT(OUT), POINTER or VALUE attribute; furthermore, they shall be either scalar or of assumed-size (dimension(*)). As TYPE(*), the NO_ARG_CHECK attribute requires an explicit interface.

The attributes are specified using the syntax

!GCC$ ATTRIBUTES attribute-list :: variable-list

where in free-form source code only whitespace is allowed before !GCC$ and in fixed-form source code !GCC$, cGCC$ or *GCC$ shall start in the first column.

For procedures, the compiler directives shall be placed into the body of the procedure; for variables and procedure pointers, they shall be in the same declaration part as the variable or procedure pointer.


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7.3 Non-Fortran Main Program

Even if you are doing mixed-language programming, it is very likely that you do not need to know or use the information in this section. Since it is about the internal structure of GNU Fortran, it may also change in GCC minor releases.

When you compile a PROGRAM with GNU Fortran, a function with the name main (in the symbol table of the object file) is generated, which initializes the libgfortran library and then calls the actual program which uses the name MAIN__, for historic reasons. If you link GNU Fortran compiled procedures to, e.g., a C or C++ program or to a Fortran program compiled by a different compiler, the libgfortran library is not initialized and thus a few intrinsic procedures do not work properly, e.g. those for obtaining the command-line arguments.

Therefore, if your PROGRAM is not compiled with GNU Fortran and the GNU Fortran compiled procedures require intrinsics relying on the library initialization, you need to initialize the library yourself. Using the default options, gfortran calls _gfortran_set_args and _gfortran_set_options. The initialization of the former is needed if the called procedures access the command line (and for backtracing); the latter sets some flags based on the standard chosen or to enable backtracing. In typical programs, it is not necessary to call any initialization function.

If your PROGRAM is compiled with GNU Fortran, you shall not call any of the following functions. The libgfortran initialization functions are shown in C syntax but using C bindings they are also accessible from Fortran.


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7.3.1 _gfortran_set_args — Save command-line arguments

Description:

_gfortran_set_args saves the command-line arguments; this initialization is required if any of the command-line intrinsics is called. Additionally, it shall be called if backtracing is enabled (see _gfortran_set_options).

Syntax:

void _gfortran_set_args (int argc, char *argv[])

Arguments:
argcnumber of command line argument strings
argvthe command-line argument strings; argv[0] is the pathname of the executable itself.
Example:
int main (int argc, char *argv[])
{
  /* Initialize libgfortran.  */
  _gfortran_set_args (argc, argv);
  return 0;
}