Clive G. Page, University of Leicester, UK
27th February 2001
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled ``GNU Free Documentation License".
This file contains the text of Professional Programmer's Guide to Fortran77 published by Pitman in 1988. The book is now long out of print, so it seemed sensible to make the text freely available over the Internet. The ISO Standard for Fortran77 is, of course, now obsolete, since Fortran90 and Fortran95 have replaced it. I strongly recommend using Fortran95 as a multitude of features have been added to Fortran which make programming easier and programs more reliable.
One of the attractions of Fortran77 is that a good free compiler exists in the form of GNU Fortran, g77. At present I don't know of any free compilers for full Fortran95, but you can download a compiler for a subset language called F, which seems an excellent way to learn modern Fortran. Unfortunately this book will not be much help with F or Fortran95. Perhaps some day I may get time to revise it completely.
For more information on Fortran (and F) see these web-sites, which have links to many others:
http://www.star.le.ac.uk/~cgp My home page http://www.fortran.com/ Fortran Market and F home page. http://www.ifremer.fr/ditigo/molagnon/fortran90/engfaq.html Excellent FAQ http://dsm.dsm.fordham.edu/~ftnchek/ FTNCHEK static analyzerWhether you write your own programs in Fortran77, or merely use code written by others, I strongly urge you to use FTNCHEK syntax checker to find mistakes. You can download versions for many platforms from the web-site listed above.
I wrote the book originally using WordPerfect, but later translated it into LaTeXto make it easier to produce on-line versions in HTML and Postscript. The text here is very similar to the published version but I took the opportunity to correct a few mistakes and make some very minor updates. If you find more errors, please let me know (email to cgp@le.ac.uk).
The book was intentionally kept as short as possible so it could be sold at a modest price, but I managed to cover the entire Fortran77 language as defined in the ANSI and ISO Standards, including several topics which are often omitted from much larger textbooks because they are deemed to be too ``advanced".
In order to encourage the writing of clear, reliable, portable, robust, and well structured code, short sections appear throughout the book offering specific guidance on the the practical use of Fortran. Obsolete or superfluous features of the language, mainly those which have been retained for compatibility with earlier versions of Fortran, are omitted from the main text but are covered in the section 13. This is provided solely for the assistance of those who have to cope with existing poorly-written programs or ones which pre-date the Fortran77 standard.