Fortran 77 Tutorial

Course Outline

1. Preface
2. What is Fortran?
3. Fortran basics
4. How to use Fortran on the Unix computers at Stanford
5. Variables, types, and declarations
6. Expressions and assignment
7. Logical expressions
8. The if statements
9. Loops
10. Arrays
11. Subprograms
12. Arrays in subprograms
13. Common blocks
14. Data and Block Data Statements
15. File I/O
16. Simple I/O
17. Format statements
18. Numerical Software
BLAS
LAPACK
How to use libraries (Unix)
How can I find what I need?
19. Programming style
20. Debugging
21. Fortran resources on the Web

Copyright © 1995­7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

1
1. Preface
The goal of this Fortran tutorial is to give a quick introduction to the most common features of the Fortran 77
programming language. A companion tutorial introduces the key enhancements found in Fortran 90. It is not a
complete reference! Many details have been omitted. The presentation focuses on scientific computations, mainly
linear algebra. The outline of this tutorial was inspired by the book "Handbook for Matrix Computations" by T.F.
Coleman and C. Van Loan, published by SIAM. Sections of this tutorial pertaining to Fortran 90 were based on the
book "FORTRAN 77 for Engineers and Scientists with an Introduction to Fortran 90" by L. Nyhoff and S. Leestma
published by Prentice Hall.

This tutorial was designed by Erik Boman to be used in the course SCCM-001-F: Introduction to Fortran taught at
Stanford University, Winter quarter 1996. It has been modified by Sarah T. Whitlock and Paul H. Hargrove for use
in the Fortran courses which have been offered under different course numbers each subsequent year. Permission
to use this tutorial for educational and other non-commercial purposes is granted provided all author and copyright
information is retained.

Paul H. Hargrove, Stanford, December 1997.

Sarah T. Whitlock, Stanford, January 1997.
Erik Boman, Stanford, December 1995.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

2
2. What is Fortran?
Fortran is a general purpose programming language, mainly intended for mathematical computations in e.g.
engineering. Fortran is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, and was originally capitalized as FORTRAN.
However, following the current trend to only capitalize the first letter in acronyms, we will call it Fortran. Fortran
was the first ever high-level programming language. The work on Fortran started in the 1950's at IBM and there
have been many versions since. By convention, a Fortran version is denoted by the last two digits of the year the
standard was proposed. Thus we have

Fortran 66
Fortran 77
Fortran 90 (95)

The most common Fortran version today is still Fortran 77, although Fortran 90 is growing in popularity. Fortran 95
is a revised version of Fortran 90 which (as of early 1996) is expected to be approved by ANSI soon. There are also
several versions of Fortran aimed at parallel computers. The most important one is High Performance Fortran
(HPF), which is a de-facto standard.

Users should be aware that most Fortran 77 compilers allow a superset of Fortran 77, i.e. they allow non-standard
extensions. In this tutorial we will emphasize standard ANSI Fortran 77.

Why learn Fortran?

Fortran is the dominant programming language used in engineering applications. It is therefore important for
engineering graduates to be able to read and modify Fortran code. From time to time, so-called experts predict
that Fortran will rapidly fade in popularity and soon become extinct. These predictions have always failed. Fortran
is the most enduring computer programming language in history. One of the main reasons Fortran has survived and
will survive is software inertia. Once a company has spent many man-years and perhaps millions of dollars on a
software product, it is unlikely to try to translate the software to a different language. Reliable software translation
is a very difficult task.

Portability

A major advantage Fortran has is that it is standardized by ANSI and ISO (see footnotes). Consequently, if your
program is written in ANSI Fortran 77, using nothing outside the standard, then it will run on any computer that
has a Fortran 77 compiler. Thus, Fortran programs are portable across machine platforms. (If you want to read
some Fortran Standards Documents, click here.)

Footnotes:
ANSI = American National Standards Institute
ISO = International Standards Organization

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

3
3. Fortran 77 Basics
A Fortran program is just a sequence of lines of text. The text has to follow a certain structure to be a valid Fortran
program. We start by looking at a simple example:
program circle
real r, area

c This program reads a real number r and prints

c the area of a circle with radius r.

write (*,*) 'Give radius r:'

read (*,*) r
area = 3.14159*r*r
write (*,*) 'Area = ', area

stop
end

The lines that begin with with a "c" are comments and have no purpose other than to make the program more
readable for humans. Originally, all Fortran programs had to be written in all upper-case letters. Most people now
write lower-case since this is more legible, and so will we. You may wish to mix case, but Fortran is not
case-sensitive, so "X" and "x" are the same variable.

Program organization

A Fortran program generally consists of a main program (or driver) and possibly several subprograms (procedures
or subroutines). For now we will place all the statements in the main program; subprograms will be treated later.
The structure of a main program is:
program name

declarations

statements

stop
end

In this tutorial, words that are in italics should not be taken as literal text, but rather as a description of what
belongs in their place.

The stop statement is optional and may seem superfluous since the program will stop when it reaches the end
anyway, but it is recommended to always terminate a program with the stop statement to emphasize that the
execution flow stops there.

You should note that you cannot have a variable with the same name as the program.

Column position rules

Fortran 77 is not a free-format language, but has a very strict set of rules for how the source code should be
formatted. The most important rules are the column position rules:

Col. 1 : Blank, or a "c" or "*" for comments

Col. 1-5 : Statement label (optional)
Col. 6 : Continuation of previous line (optional)
Col. 7-72 : Statements
Col. 73-80: Sequence number (optional, rarely used today)

Most lines in a Fortran 77 program starts with 6 blanks and ends before column 72, i.e. only the statement field is
used.

Comments

A line that begins with the letter "c" or an asterisk in the first column is a comment. Comments may appear
anywhere in the program. Well-written comments are crucial to program readability. Commercial Fortran codes
often contain about 50% comments. You may also encounter Fortran programs that use the exclamation mark (!)

4
for comments. This is not a standard part of Fortran 77, but is supported by several Fortran 77 compilers and is
explicitly allowed in Fortran 90. When understood, the exclamation mark may appear anywhere on a line (except in
positions 2-6).

Continuation

Sometimes, a statement does not fit into the 66 available columns of a single line. One can then break the
statement into two or more lines, and use the continuation mark in position 6. Example:

c23456789 (This demonstrates column position!)

c The next statement goes over two physical lines

area = 3.14159265358979
+ * r * r

Any character can be used instead of the plus sign as a continuation character. It is considered good programming
style to use either the plus sign, an ampersand, or digits (using 2 for the second line, 3 for the third, and so on).

Blank spaces

Blank spaces are ignored in Fortran 77. So if you remove all blanks in a Fortran 77 program, the program is still
acceptable to a complier but almost unreadable to humans.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

5
4. How to use Fortran on the Unix computers at Stanford
Practical details

For the course ME390 you will need an account on the leland computers. If you don't have one, you should go over
to the consultants' desk on the second floor of Sweet Hall and open an account ASAP.

In this class, we will be using Fortran under the Unix operating system. If you have no previous experience with
Unix, you will have to learn the basics on your own. The consultants at Sweet Hall have some brochures that can
be useful. There is also a class taught in the CS department that gives an introduction to Unix.

You can use any Unix workstation that has a Fortran 77 compiler. We recommend that you use one of the Sun
workstations, so you should log onto one of the "elaine", "epic", "adelbert" or "saga" machines.

Source code, object code, compiling, and linking

A Fortran program consists of plain text that follows certain rules (syntax). This is called the source code. You need
to use an editor to write (edit) the source code. The most common editors in Unix are emacs and vi, but these can
be a bit tricky for novice users. You may want to use a simpler editor, like xedit which runs under X-windows.

When you have written a Fortran program, you should save it in a file that has the extension .f or .for. Before you
can execute the program, you have translate the program into machine readable form. This is done by a special
program called a compiler. The Fortran 77 compilers are usually called f77. The output from the compilation is
given the somewhat cryptic name [Link] by default, but you can choose another name if you wish. To run the
program, simply type the name of the executable file, for example [Link]. (This explanation is a bit oversimplified.
Really the compiler translates source code into object code and the linker/loader makes this into an executable.)

Examples:

In the class directory there is a small Fortran program called circle.f. You can compile and run it by following these
steps:

cp /usr/class/me390/circle*.f .
f77 circle.f
[Link]

(Note that there are several dots (periods) there which can be easy to miss!) If you need to have several
executables at the same time, it is a good idea to give the executables descriptive names. This can be accomplished
using the -o option. For example,
f77 circle.f -o [Link]

will compile the file circle.f and save the executable in the file [Link]. Please note that object codes and
executables take a lot of disk space, so you should delete them when you are not using them. (The remove
command in Unix is rm.)

In the previous examples, we have not distinguished between compiling and linking. These are two different
processes but the Fortran compiler performs them both, so the user usually does not need to know about it. But in
the next example we will use two source code files.

f77 circle1.f circle2.f

This will generate three files, the two object code files circle1.o and circle2.o, plus the executable file [Link]. What
really happened here, is that the Fortran compiler first compiled each of the source code files into object files
(ending in .o) and then linked the two object files together into the executable [Link]. You can separate these two
step by using the -c option to tell the compiler to only compile the source files:
f77 -c circle1.f circle2.f
f77 circle1.o circle2.o

Compiling separate files like this may be useful if there are many files and only a few of them needs to be
recompiled. In Unix there is a useful command called make which is usually used to handle large software
packages with many source files. These packages come with a makefile and all the user has to do is to type make.
Writing makefiles is a bit complicated so we will not discuss this in this tutorial.

6
Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

7
5. Variables, types, and declarations
Variable names

Variable names in Fortran consist of 1-6 characters chosen from the letters a-z and the digits 0-9. The first character
must be a letter. Fortran 77 does not distinguish between upper and lower case, in fact, it assumes all input is
upper case. However, nearly all Fortran 77 compilers will accept lower case. If you should ever encounter a Fortran
77 compiler that insists on upper case it is usually easy to convert the source code to all upper case.

The words which make up the Fortran language are called reserved words and cannot be used as names of
variable. Some of the reserved words which we have seen so far are "program", "real", "stop" and "end".

Types and declarations

Every variable should be defined in a declaration. This establishes the type of the variable. The most common
declarations are:
integer list of variables
real list of variables
double precision list of variables
complex list of variables
logical list of variables
character list of variables

The list of variables should consist of variable names separated by commas. Each variable should be declared
exactly once. If a variable is undeclared, Fortran 77 uses a set of implicit rules to establish the type. This means all
variables starting with the letters i-n are integers and all others are real. Many old Fortran 77 programs uses these
implicit rules, but you should not! The probability of errors in your program grows dramatically if you do not
consistently declare your variables.

Integers and floating point variables

Fortran 77 has only one type for integer variables. Integers are usually stored as 32 bits (4 bytes) variables.
Therefore, all integer variables should take on values in the range [-m,m] where m is approximately 2*10^9.

Fortran 77 has two different types for floating point variables, called real and double precision. While real is often
adequate, some numerical calculations need very high precision and double precision should be used. Usually a real
is a 4 byte variable and the double precision is 8 bytes, but this is machine dependent. Some non-standard Fortran
versions use the syntax real*8 to denote 8 byte floating point variables.

The parameter statement

Some constants appear many times in a program. It is then often desirable to define them only once, in the
beginning of the program. This is what the parameter statement is for. It also makes programs more readable. For
example, the circle area program should rather have been written like this:
program circle
real r, area, pi
parameter (pi = 3.14159)

c This program reads a real number r and prints

c the area of a circle with radius r.

write (*,*) 'Give radius r:'

read (*,*) r
area = pi*r*r
write (*,*) 'Area = ', area

stop
end

The syntax of the parameter statement is

parameter (name = constant, ... , name = constant)

The rules for the parameter statement are:

8
 The name defined in the parameter statement is not a variable but rather a constant. (You cannot change its
value at a later point in the program.)
A name can appear in at most one parameter statement.
The parameter statement(s) must come before the first executable statement.

Some good reasons to use the parameter statement are:

It helps reduce the number of typos.

It makes it easier to change a constant that appears many times in a program.
It increases the readability of your program.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

9
6. Expressions and assignment
Constants

The simplest form of an expression is a constant. There are 6 types of constants, corresponding to the 6 data types.
Here are some integer constants:

1
0
-100
32767
+15

Then we have real constants:

1.0
-0.25
2.0E6
3.333E-1

The E-notation means that you should multiply the constant by 10 raised to the power following the "E". Hence,
2.0E6 is two million, while 3.333E-1 is approximately one third.

For constants that are larger than the largest real allowed, or that requires high precision, double precision should
be used. The notation is the same as for real constants except the "E" is replaced by a "D". Examples:
2.0D-1
1D99

Here 2.0D-1 is a double precision one-fifth, while 1D99 is a one followed by 99 zeros.

The next type is complex constants. This is designated by a pair of constants (integer or real), separated by a
comma and enclosed in parentheses. Examples are:
(2, -3)
(1., 9.9E-1)

The first number denotes the real part and the second the imaginary part.

The fifth type is logical constants. These can only have one of two values:

.TRUE.
.FALSE.

Note that the dots enclosing the letters are required.

The last type is character constants. These are most often used as an array of characters, called a string. These
consist of an arbitrary sequence of characters enclosed in apostrophes (single quotes):
'ABC'
'Anything goes!'
'It is a nice day'

Strings and character constants are case sensitive. A problem arises if you want to have an apostrophe in the string
itself. In this case, you should double the apostrophe:
'It''s a nice day'

Expressions

The simplest non-constant expressions are of the form

operand operator operand

and an example is

x + y

The result of an expression is itself an operand, hence we can nest expressions together like

10
 x + 2 * y

This raises the question of precedence: Does the last expression mean x + (2*y) or (x+2)*y? The precedence of
arithmetic operators in Fortran 77 are (from highest to lowest):

** {exponentiation}
*,/ {multiplication, division}
+,- {addition, subtraction}

All these operators are calculated left-to-right, except the exponentiation operator **, which has right-to-left
precedence. If you want to change the default evaluation order, you can use parentheses.

The above operators are all binary operators. there is also the unary operator - for negation, which takes
precedence over the others. Hence an expression like -x+y means what you would expect.

Extreme caution must be taken when using the division operator, which has a quite different meaning for integers
and reals. If the operands are both integers, an integer division is performed, otherwise a real arithmetic division is
performed. For example, 3/2 equals 1, while 3./2. equals 1.5 (note the decimal points).

Assignment

The assignment has the form

variable_name = expression

The interpretation is as follows: Evaluate the right hand side and assign the resulting value to the variable on the
left. The expression on the right may contain other variables, but these never change value! For example,

area = pi * r**2

does not change the value of pi or r, only area.

Type conversion

When different data types occur in the same expression, type conversion has to take place, either explicitly or
implicitly. Fortran will do some type conversion implicitly. For example,
real x
x = x + 1

will convert the integer one to the real number one, and has the desired effect of incrementing x by one. However,
in more complicated expressions, it is good programming practice to force the necessary type conversions
explicitly. For numbers, the following functions are available:
int
real
dble
ichar
char

The first three have the obvious meaning. ichar takes a character and converts it to an integer, while char does
exactly the opposite.

Example: How to multiply two real variables x and y using double precision and store the result in the double
precision variable w:
w = dble(x)*dble(y)

Note that this is different from

w = dble(x*y)

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

11
7. Logical expressions
Logical expressions can only have the value .TRUE. or .FALSE.. A logical expression can be formed by comparing
arithmetic expressions using the following relational operators:
.LT. meaning <.LE. <=".GT.">
.GE. >=
.EQ. =
.NE. /=

So you cannot use symbols like Logical expressions can be combined by the logical operators .AND. .OR. .NOT. which
have the obvious meaning.

Logical variables and assignment

Truth values can be stored in logical variables. The assignment is analogous to the arithmetic assignment.
Example:
logical a, b
a = .TRUE.
b = a .AND. 3 .LT. 5/2

The order of precedence is important, as the last example shows. The rule is that arithmetic expressions are
evaluated first, then relational operators, and finally logical operators. Hence b will be assigned .FALSE. in the
example above. Among the logical operators the precedence (in the absence of parenthesis) is that .NOT. is done
first, then .AND., then .OR. is done last.

Logical variables are seldom used in Fortran. But logical expressions are frequently used in conditional statements
like the if statement.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

12
8. The if statements
An important part of any programming language are the conditional statements. The most common such statement
in Fortran is the if statement, which actually has several forms. The simplest one is the logical if statement:
if (logical expression) executable statement

This has to be written on one line. This example finds the absolute value of x:

if (x .LT. 0) x = -x

If more than one statement should be executed inside the if, then the following syntax should be used:

if (logical expression) then

statements
endif

The most general form of the if statement has the following form:

if (logical expression) then

statements
elseif (logical expression) then
statements
:
:
else
statements
endif

The execution flow is from top to bottom. The conditional expressions are evaluated in sequence until one is found
to be true. Then the associated statements are executed and the control resumes after the endif.

Nested if statements

if statements can be nested in several levels. To ensure readability, it is important to use proper indentation. Here
is an example:
if (x .GT. 0) then
if (x .GE. y) then
write(*,*) 'x is positive and x >= y'
else
write(*,*) 'x is positive but x
You should avoid nesting many levels of if statements
since things get hard to follow.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

13
9. Loops
For repeated execution of similar things, loops are used. If you are familiar with other programming languages you
have probably heard about for-loops, while-loops, and until-loops. Fortran 77 has only one loop construct, called the
do-loop. The do-loop corresponds to what is known as a for-loop in other languages. Other loop constructs have to be
built using the if and goto statements.

do-loops

The do-loop is used for simple counting. Here is a simple example that prints the cumulative sums of the integers
from 1 through n (assume n has been assigned a value elsewhere):
integer i, n, sum

sum = 0
do 10 i = 1, n
sum = sum + i
write(*,*) 'i =', i
write(*,*) 'sum =', sum
10 continue

The number 10 is a statement label. Typically, there will be many loops and other statements in a single program
that require a statement label. The programmer is responsible for assigning a unique number to each label in each
program (or subprogram). Recall that column positions 1-5 are reserved for statement labels. The numerical value
of statement labels have no significance, so any integers can be used, in any order. Typically, most programmers
use consecutive multiples of 10.

The variable defined in the do-statement is incremented by 1 by default. However, you can define the step to be any
number but zero. This program segment prints the even numbers between 1 and 10 in decreasing order:
integer i

do 20 i = 10, 1, -2
write(*,*) 'i =', i
20 continue

The general form of the do loop is as follows:

do label var = expr1, expr2, expr3

statements
label continue

var is the loop variable (often called the loop index) which must be integer. expr1 specifies the initial value of var,
expr2 is the terminating bound, and expr3 is the increment (step).

Note: The do-loop variable must never be changed by other statements within the loop! This will cause great
confusion.

The loop index can be of type real, but due to round off errors may not take on exactly the expected sequence of
values.

Many Fortran 77 compilers allow do-loops to be closed by the enddo statement. The advantage of this is that the
statement label can then be omitted since it is assumed that an enddo closes the nearest previous do statement. The
enddo construct is widely used, but it is not a part of ANSI Fortran 77.

It should be noted that unlike some programming languages, Fortran only evaluates the start, end, and step
expressions once, before the first pass thought the body of the loop. This means that the following do-loop will
multiply a non-negative j by two (the hard way), rather than running forever as the equivalent loop might in
another language.
integer i,j

read (*,*) j
do 20 i = 1, j
j = j + 1
20 continue
write (*,*) j

14
while-loops

The most intuitive way to write a while-loop is

while (logical expr) do

statements
enddo

or alternatively,

do while (logical expr)

statements
enddo

The program will alternate testing the condition and executing the statements in the body as long as the condition
in the while statement is true. Even though this syntax is accepted by many compilers, it is not ANSI Fortran 77.
The correct way is to use if and goto:
label if (logical expr) then
statements
goto label
endif

Here is an example that calculates and prints all the powers of two that are less than or equal to 100:
integer n

n = 1
10 if (n .le. 100) then
write (*,*) n
n = 2*n
goto 10
endif

until-loops

If the termination criterion is at the end instead of the beginning, it is often called an until-loop. The pseudocode
looks like this:
do
statements
until (logical expr)

Again, this should be implemented in Fortran 77 by using if and goto:

label continue
statements
if (logical expr) goto label

Note that the logical expression in the latter version should be the negation of the expression given in the
pseudocode!

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

15
10. Arrays
Many scientific computations use vectors and matrices. The data type Fortran uses for representing such objects is
the array. A one-dimensional array corresponds to a vector, while a two-dimensional array corresponds to a matrix.
To fully understand how this works in Fortran 77, you will have to know not only the syntax for usage, but also how
these objects are stored in memory in Fortran 77.

One-dimensional arrays

The simplest array is the one-dimensional array, which is just a sequence of elements stored consecutively in
memory. For example, the declaration
real a(20)

declares a as a real array of length 20. That is, a consists of 20 real numbers stored contiguously in memory. By
convention, Fortran arrays are indexed from 1 and up. Thus the first number in the array is denoted by a(1) and the
last by a(20). However, you may define an arbitrary index range for your arrays using the following syntax:
real b(0:19), weird(-162:237)

Here, b is exactly similar to a from the previous example, except the index runs from 0 through 19. weird is an array
of length 237-(-162)+1 = 400.

The type of an array element can be any of the basic data types. Examples:
integer i(10)
logical aa(0:1)
double precision x(100)

Each element of an array can be thought of as a separate variable. You reference the i'th element of array a by a(i).
Here is a code segment that stores the 10 first square numbers in the array sq:
integer i, sq(10)

do 100 i = 1, 10
sq(i) = i**2
100 continue

A common bug in Fortran is that the program tries to access array elements that are out of bounds or undefined.
This is the responsibility of the programmer, and the Fortran compiler will not detect any such bugs!

Two-dimensional arrays

Matrices are very important in linear algebra. Matrices are usually represented by two-dimensional arrays. For
example, the declaration
real A(3,5)

defines a two-dimensional array of 3*5=15 real numbers. It is useful to think of the first index as the row index, and
the second as the column index. Hence we get the graphical picture:
(1,1) (1,2) (1,3) (1,4) (1,5)
(2,1) (2,2) (2,3) (2,4) (2,5)
(3,1) (3,2) (3,3) (3,4) (3,5)

Two-dimensional arrays may also have indices in an arbitrary defined range. The general syntax for declarations is:

name (low_index1 : hi_index1, low_index2 : hi_index2)

The total size of the array is then

size = (hi_index1-low_index1+1)*(hi_index2-low_index2+1)

It is quite common in Fortran to declare arrays that are larger than the matrix we want to store. (This is because
Fortran does not have dynamic storage allocation.) This is perfectly legal. Example:

real A(3,5)

16
 integer i,j
c
c We will only use the upper 3 by 3 part of this array.
c
do 20 j = 1, 3
do 10 i = 1, 3
a(i,j) = real(i)/real(j)
10 continue
20 continue

The elements in the submatrix A(1:3,4:5) are undefined. Do not assume these elements are initialized to zero by the
compiler (some compilers will do this, but not all).

Storage format for 2-dimensional arrays

Fortran stores higher dimensional arrays as a contiguous sequence of elements. It is important to know that
2-dimensional arrays are stored by column. So in the above example, array element (1,2) will follow element (3,1).
Then follows the rest of the second column, thereafter the third column, and so on.

Consider again the example where we only use the upper 3 by 3 submatrix of the 3 by 5 array A(3,5). The 9
interesting elements will then be stored in the first nine memory locations, while the last six are not used. This
works out neatly because the leading dimension is the same for both the array and the matrix we store in the array.
However, frequently the leading dimension of the array will be larger than the first dimension of the matrix. Then
the matrix will not be stored contiguously in memory, even if the array is contiguous. For example, suppose the
declaration was A(5,3) instead. Then there would be two "unused" memory cells between the end of one column and
the beginning of the next column (again we are assuming the matrix is 3 by 3).

This may seem complicated, but actually it is quite simple when you get used to it. If you are in doubt, it can be
useful to look at how the address of an array element is computed. Each array will have some memory address
assigned to the beginning of the array, that is element (1,1). The address of element (i,j) is then given by
addr[A(i,j)] = addr[A(1,1)] + (j-1)*lda + (i-1)

where lda is the leading (i.e. row) dimension of A. Note that lda is in general different from the actual matrix
dimension. Many Fortran errors are caused by this, so it is very important you understand the distinction!

Multi-dimensional arrays

Fortran 77 allows arrays of up to seven dimensions. The syntax and storage format are analogous to the
two-dimensional case, so we will not spend time on this.

The dimension statement

There is an alternate way to declare arrays in Fortran 77. The statements

real A, x
dimension x(50)
dimension A(10,20)

are equivalent to
real A(10,20), x(50)

This dimension statement is considered old-fashioned style today.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

17
11. Subprograms
When a program is more than a few hundred lines long, it gets hard to follow. Fortran codes that solve real
engineering problems often have tens of thousands of lines. The only way to handle such big codes, is to use a
modular approach and split the program into many separate smaller units called subprograms.

A subprogram is a (small) piece of code that solves a well defined subproblem. In a large program, one often has to
solve the same subproblems with many different data. Instead of replicating code, these tasks should be solved by
subprograms . The same subprogram can be invoked many times with different input data.

Fortran has two different types of subprograms, called functions and subroutines.

Functions

Fortran functions are quite similar to mathematical functions: They both take a set of input arguments
(parameters) and return a value of some type. In the preceding discussion we talked about user defined
subprograms. Fortran 77 also has some intrinsic (built-in) functions.

A simple example illustrates how to use a function:

x = cos(pi/3.0)

Here cos is the cosine function, so x will be assigned the value 0.5 (if pi has been correctly defined; Fortran 77 has
no built-in constants). There are many intrinsic functions in Fortran 77. Some of the most common are:

abs absolute value

min minimum value
max maximum value
sqrt square root
sin sine
cos cosine
tan tangent
atan arctangent
exp exponential (natural)
log logarithm (natural)

In general, a function always has a type. Most of the built-in functions mentioned above, however, are generic. So
in the example above, pi and x could be either of type real or double precision. The compiler would check the types
and use the correct version of cos (real or double precision). Unfortunately, Fortran is not really a polymorphic
language so in general you have to be careful to match the types of your variables and your functions!

Now we turn to the user-written functions. Consider the following problem: A meteorologist has studied the
precipitation levels in the Bay Area and has come up with a model r(m,t) where r is the amount of rain, m is the
month, and t is a scalar parameter that depends on the location. Given the formula for r and the value of t, compute
the annual rainfall.

The obvious way to solve the problem is to write a loop that runs over all the months and sums up the values of r.
Since computing the value of r is an independent subproblem, it is convenient to implement it as a function. The
following main program can be used:

program rain
real r, t, sum
integer m

read (*,*) t
sum = 0.0
do 10 m = 1, 12
sum = sum + r(m, t)
10 continue
write (*,*) 'Annual rainfall is ', sum, 'inches'

stop
end

Note that we have declared 'r' to be 'real' just as we would a variable. In addition, the function r has to be defined
as a Fortran function. The formula the meteorologist came up with was
r(m,t) = t/10 * (m**2 + 14*m + 46) if this is positive

18
 r(m,t) = 0 otherwise

The corresponding Fortran function is

real function r(m,t)

integer m
real t

r = 0.1*t * (m**2 + 14*m + 46)

if (r .LT. 0) r = 0.0

return
end

We see that the structure of a function closely resembles that of the main program. The main differences are:

Functions have a type. This type must also be declared in the calling program.
The return value should be stored in a variable with the same name as the function.
Functions are terminated by the return statement instead of stop.

To sum up, the general syntax of a Fortran 77 function is:

type function name (list-of-variables)

declarations
statements
return
end

The function has to be declared with the correct type in the calling program unit. If you use a function which has
not been declared, Fortran will try to use the same implicit typing used for variables, probably getting it wrong.
The function is called by simply using the function name and listing the parameters in parenthesis.

It should be noted that strictly speaking Fortran 77 doesn't permit recursion (functions which call themselves).
However, it is not uncommon for a compiler to allow recursion.

Subroutines

A Fortran function can essentially only return one value. Often we want to return two or more values (or sometimes
none!). For this purpose we use the subroutine construct. The syntax is as follows:

subroutine name (list-of-arguments)

declarations
statements
return
end

Note that subroutines have no type and consequently should not (cannot) be declared in the calling program unit.
They are also invoked differently than functions, using the word call before their names and parameters.

We give an example of a very simple subroutine. The purpose of the subroutine is to swap two integers.
subroutine iswap (a, b)
integer a, b
c Local variables
integer tmp

tmp = a
a = b
b = tmp

return
end

Note that there are two blocks of variable declarations here. First, we declare the input/output parameters, i.e. the
variables that are common to both the caller and the callee. Afterwards, we declare the local variables, i.e. the
variables that can only be used within this subprogram. We can use the same variable names in different
subprograms and the compiler will know that they are different variables that just happen to have the same names.

Call-by-reference

19
Fortran 77 uses the so-called call-by-reference paradigm. This means that instead of just passing the values of the
function/subroutine arguments (call-by-value), the memory address of the arguments (pointers) are passed instead.
A small example should show the difference:
program callex
integer m, n
c
m = 1
n = 2

call iswap(m, n)
write(*,*) m, n

stop
end

The output from this program is "2 1", just as one would expect. However, if Fortran 77 had been using
call-by-value then the output would have been "1 2", i.e. the variables m and n were unchanged! The reason for this
is that only the values of m and n had been copied to the subroutine iswap, and even if a and b were swapped
inside the subroutine the new values would not have been passed back to the main program.

In the above example, call-by-reference was exactly what we wanted. But you have to be careful about this when
writing Fortran code, because it is easy to introduce undesired side effects. For example, sometimes it is tempting
to use an input parameter in a subprogram as a local variable and change its value. Since the new value will then
propagate back to the calling program with an unexpected value, you should never do this unless (like our iswap
subroutine) the change is part of the purpose of the subroutine.

We will come back to this issue in a later section on passing arrays as arguments (parameters).

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

20
12. Arrays in subprograms
Fortran subprogram calls are based on call by reference. This means that the calling parameters are not copied to
the called subprogram, but rather that the addresses of the parameters (variables) are passed. This saves a lot of
memory space when dealing with arrays. No extra storage is needed as the subroutine operates on the same
memory locations as the calling (sub-)program. However, you as a programmer have to know about this and take it
into account.

It is possible to declare local arrays in Fortran subprograms, but this feature is rarely used. Typically, all arrays are
declared (and dimensioned) in the main program and then passed on to the subprograms as needed.

Variable length arrays

A basic vector operation is the saxpy operation. This calculates the expression

y := alpha*x + y

where alpha is a scalar but x and y are vectors. Here is a simple subroutine for this:

subroutine saxpy (n, alpha, x, y)

integer n
real alpha, x(*), y(*)
c
c Saxpy: Compute y := alpha*x + y,
c where x and y are vectors of length n (at least).
c
c Local variables
integer i
c
do 10 i = 1, n
y(i) = alpha*x(i) + y(i)
10 continue
c
return
end

The only new feature here is the use of the asterisk in the declarations x(*) and y(*). This notation says that x and y
are arrays of arbitrary length. The advantage of this is that we can use the same subroutine for all vector lengths.
Recall that since Fortran is based on call-by-reference, no additional space is allocated but rather the subroutine
works directly on the array elements from the calling routine/program. It is the responsibility of the programmer to
make sure that the vectors x and y really have been declared to have length n or more in some other program unit.
A common error in Fortran 77 occurs when you try to access out-of-bounds array elements.

We could also have declared the arrays like this:

real x(n), y(n)

Most programmers prefer to use the asterisk notation to emphasize that the "real array length" is unknown. Some
old Fortran 77 programs may declare variable length arrays like this:
real x(1), y(1)

This is legal syntax even if the array lengths are greater than one! But this is poor programming style and is
strongly discouraged.

Passing subsections of arrays

Next we want to write a subroutine for matrix-vector multiplication. There are two basic ways to do this, either by
using inner products or saxpy operations. Let us be modular and re-use the saxpy code from the previous section. A
simple code is given below.
subroutine matvec (m, n, A, lda, x, y)
integer m, n, lda
real x(*), y(*), A(lda,*)
c
c Compute y = A*x, where A is m by n and stored in an array
c with leading dimension lda.
c

21
c Local variables
integer i, j

c Initialize y
do 10 i = 1, m
y(i) = 0.0
10 continue

c Matrix-vector product by saxpy on columns in A.

c Notice that the length of each column of A is m, not n!
do 20 j = 1, n
call saxpy (m, x(j), A(1,j), y)
20 continue

return
end

There are several important things to note here. First, note that even if we have written the code as general as
possible to allow for arbitrary dimensions m and n, we still need to specify the leading dimension of the matrix A.
The variable length declaration (*) can only be used for the last dimension of an array! The reason for this is the
way Fortran 77 stores multidimensional arrays (see the section on arrays).

When we compute y = A*x by saxpy operations, we need to access columns of A. The j'th column of A is A(1:m,j).
However, in Fortran 77 we cannot use such subarray syntax (but it is encouraged in Fortran 90!). So instead we
provide a pointer to the first element in the column, which is A(1,j) (it is not really a pointer, but it may be helpful
to think of it as if it were). We know that the next memory locations will contain the succeeding array elements in
this column. The saxpy subroutine will treat A(1,j) as the first element of a vector, and does not know that this
vector happens to be a column of a matrix.

Finally, note that we have stuck to the convention that matrices have m rows and n columns. The index i is used as
a row index (1 to m) while the index j is used as a column index (1 to n). Most Fortran programs handling linear
algebra use this notation and it makes it a lot easier to read the code!

Different dimensions

Sometimes it can be beneficial to treat a 1-dimensional array as a 2-dimensional array and vice versa. This is fairly
simple to do in Fortran 77, some will say it is too easy!

Let us look at a very simple example. Another basic vector operation is scaling, i.e. multiplying each element in a
vector by the same constant. Here is a subroutine for this:
subroutine scale(n, alpha, x)
integer n
real alpha, x(*)
c
c Local variables
integer i

do 10 i = 1, n
x(i) = alpha * x(i)
10 continue

return
end

Now suppose we have a m by n matrix we want to scale. Instead of writing a new subroutine for this, we can simply
treat the matrix as a vector and use the subroutine scale. A simple version is given first:
integer m, n
parameter (m=10, n=20)
real alpha, A(m,n)

c Some statements here define A...

c Now we want to scale A

call scale(m*n, alpha, A)

Note that this example works because we assume the declared dimension of A equals the actual dimension of the
matrix stored in A. This does not hold in general. Often the leading dimension lda is different from the actual
dimension m, and great care must be taken to handle this correctly. Here is a more robust subroutine for scaling a

22
matrix that uses the subroutine scale:

subroutine mscale(m, n, alpha, A, lda)

integer m, n, lda
real alpha, A(lda,*)
c
c Local variables
integer j

do 10 j = 1, n
call scale(m, alpha, A(1,j) )
10 continue

return
end

This version works even when m is not equal to lda since we scale one column at a time and only process the m
first elements of each column (leaving the rest untouched).

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

23
13. Common blocks
Fortran 77 has no global variables, i.e. variables that are shared among several program units (subroutines). The
only way to pass information between subroutines we have seen so far is to use the subroutine parameter list.
Sometimes this is inconvenient, e.g., when many subroutines share a large set of parameters. In such cases one
can use a common block. This is a way to specify that certain variables should be shared among certain
subroutines. But in general, the use of common blocks should be minimized.

Example

Suppose you have two parameters alpha and beta that many of your subroutines need. The following example
shows how it can be done using common blocks.

program main
some declarations
real alpha, beta
common /coeff/ alpha, beta

statements
stop
end

subroutine sub1 (some arguments)

declarations of arguments
real alpha, beta
common /coeff/ alpha, beta

statements
return
end

subroutine sub2 (some arguments)

declarations of arguments
real alpha, beta
common /coeff/ alpha, beta

statements
return
end

Here we define a common block with the name coeff. The contents of the common block are the two variables alpha
and beta. A common block can contain as many variables as you like. They do not need to all have the same type.
Every subroutine that wants to use any of the variables in the common block has to declare the whole block.

Note that in this example we could easily have avoided common blocks by passing alpha and beta as parameters
(arguments). A good rule is to try to avoid common blocks if possible. However, there are a few cases where there
is no other solution.

Syntax
common / name / list-of-variables

You should know that

The common statement should appear together with the variable declarations, before the executable statements.
Different common blocks must have different names (just like variables).
A variable cannot belong to more than one common block.
The variables in a common block do not need to have the same names each place they occur (although it is a
good idea to do so), but they must be listed in the same order and have the same type and size.

To illustrate this, look at the following continuation of our example:

subroutine sub3 (some arguments)
declarations of arguments
real a, b
common /coeff/ a, b

statements

24
 return
end

This declaration is equivalent to the previous version that used alpha and beta. It is recommended that you always
use the same variable names for the same common block to avoid confusion. Here is a dreadful example:
subroutine sub4 (some arguments)
declarations of arguments
real alpha, beta
common /coeff/ beta, alpha

statements
return
end

Now alpha is the beta from the main program and vice versa. If you see something like this, it is probably a
mistake. Such bugs are very hard to find.

Arrays in common blocks

Common blocks can include arrays, too. But again, this is not recommended. The major reason is flexibility. An
example shows why this is such a bad idea. Suppose we have the following declarations in the main program:
program main
integer nmax
parameter (nmax=20)
integer n
real A(nmax, nmax)
common /matrix/ A, n

This common block contains first all the elements of A, then the integer n. Now assume you want to use the matrix
A in some subroutines. Then you have to include the same declarations in all these subroutines, e.g.
subroutine sub1 (...)
integer nmax
parameter (nmax=20)
integer n
real A(nmax, nmax)
common /matrix/ A, n

Arrays with variable dimensions cannot appear in common blocks, thus the value of nmax has to be exactly the
same as in the main program. Recall that the size of a matrix has to be known at compile time, hence nmax has to
be defined in a parameter statement.

This example shows there is usually nothing to gain by putting arrays in common blocks. Hence the preferred
method in Fortran 77 is to pass arrays as arguments to subroutines (along with the leading dimensions).

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

25
14. Data and Block Data Statements
The data statement

The data statement is another way to input data that are known at the time when the program is written. It is
similar to the assignment statement. The syntax is:

data list-of-variables/ list-of-values/, ...

where the three dots means that this pattern can be repeated. Here is an example:
data m/10/, n/20/, x/2.5/, y/2.5/

We could also have written this

data m,n/10,20/, x,y/2*2.5/

We could have accomplished the same thing by the assignments

m = 10
n = 20
x = 2.5
y = 2.5

The data statement is more compact and therefore often more convenient. Notice especially the shorthand notation
for assigning identical values repeatedly.

The data statement is performed only once, right before the execution of the program starts. For this reason, the
data statement is mainly used in the main program and not in subroutines.

The data statement can also be used to initialize arrays (vectors, matrices). This example shows how to make sure
a matrix is all zeros when the program starts:
real A(10,20)
data A/ 200 * 0.0/

Some compilers will automatically initialize arrays like this but not all, so if you rely on array elements to be zero it
is a good idea to follow this example. Of course you can initialize arrays to other values than zero. You may even
initialize individual elements:

data A(1,1)/ 12.5/, A(2,1)/ -33.3/, A(2,2)/ 1.0/

Or you can list all the elements for small arrays like this:

integer v(5)
real B(2,2)
data v/10,20,30,40,50/, B/1.0,-3.7,4.3,0.0/

The values for two-dimensional arrays will be assigned in column-first order as usual.

The block data statement

The data statement cannot be used for variables contained in a common block. There is a special "subroutine" for
this purpose, called block data. It is not really a subroutine, but it looks a bit similar because it is given as a separate
program unit. Here is an example:
block data
integer nmax
parameter (nmax=20)
real v(nmax), alpha, beta
common /vector/v,alpha,beta
data v/20*100.0/, alpha/3.14/, beta/2.71/
end

Just as the data statement, block data is executed once before the execution of the main program starts. The
position of the block data "subroutine" in the source code is irrelevant (as long as it is not nested inside the main
program or a subprogram).

26
Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

27
15. File I/O
So far we have assumed that the input/output has been to the standard input or the standard output. It is also
possible to read from or write to files which are stored on some external storage device, typically a disk (hard disk,
floppy) or a tape. In Fortran each file is associated with a unit number, an integer between 1 and 99. Some unit
numbers are reserved: 5 is standard input, 6 is standard output.

Opening and closing a file

Before you can use a file you have to open it. The command is
open (list-of-specifiers)

where the most common specifiers are:

[UNIT=] u
IOSTAT= ios
ERR= err
FILE= fname
STATUS= sta
ACCESS= acc
FORM= frm
RECL= rl

The unit number u is a number in the range 1-99 that denotes this file (the programmer may chose any number but
he/she has to make sure it is unique).

ios is the I/O status identifier and should be an integer variable. Upon return, ios is zero if the statement was
successful and returns a non-zero value otherwise.

err is a label which the program will jump to if there is an error.

fname is a character string denoting the file name.

sta is a character string that has to be either NEW, OLD or SCRATCH. It shows the prior status of the file. A scratch
file is a file that is created when opened and deleted when closed (or the program ends).

acc must be either SEQUENTIAL or DIRECT. The default is SEQUENTIAL.

frm must be either FORMATTED or UNFORMATTED. The default is UNFORMATTED.

rl specifies the length of each record in a direct-access file.

For more details on these specifiers, see a good Fortran 77 book.

After a file has been opened, you can access it by read and write statements. When you are done with the file, it
should be closed by the statement
close ([UNIT=]u[,IOSTAT=ios,ERR=err,STATUS=sta])

where, as usual, the parameters in brackets are optional.

In this case sta is a character string which can be KEEP (the default) or DELETE.

Read and write revisited

The only necessary change from our previous simplified read/write statements, is that the unit number must be
specified. But frequently one wants to add more specifiers. Here is how:

read ([UNIT=]u, [FMT=]fmt, IOSTAT=ios, ERR=err, END=s)

write([UNIT=]u, [FMT=]fmt, IOSTAT=ios, ERR=err, END=s)

where most of the specifiers have been described above. The END=s specifier defines which statement label the
program jumps to if it reaches end-of-file.

Example

28
You are given a data file with xyz coordinates for a bunch of points. The number of points is given on the first line.
The file name of the data file is [Link]. The format for each coordinate is known to be F10.4 (We'll learn about
FORMAT statements in a later lesson). Here is a short program that reads the data into 3 arrays x,y,z:
program inpdat
c
c This program reads n points from a data file and stores them in
c 3 arrays x, y, z.
c
integer nmax, u
parameter (nmax=1000, u=20)
real x(nmax), y(nmax), z(nmax)

c Open the data file

open (u, FILE='[Link]', STATUS='OLD')

c Read the number of points

read(u,*) n
if ([Link]) then
write(*,*) 'Error: n = ', n, 'is larger than nmax =', nmax
goto 9999
endif

c Loop over the data points

do 10 i= 1, n
read(u,100) x(i), y(i), z(i)
10 enddo
100 format (3(F10.4))

c Close the file

close (u)

c Now we should process the data somehow...

c (missing part)

9999 stop
end

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

29
16. Simple I/O
An important part of any computer program is to handle input and output. In our examples so far, we have already
used the two most common Fortran constructs for this: read and write. Fortran I/O can be quite complicated, so we
will only describe some simpler cases in this tutorial.

Read and write

Read is used for input, while write is used for output. A simple form is
read (unit no, format no) list-of-variables
write(unit no, format no) list-of-variables

The unit number can refer to either standard input, standard output, or a file. The format number refers to a label
for a format statement, which will be described in the next lesson.

It is possible to simplify these statements further by using asterisks (*) for some arguments, like we have done in
most of our examples so far. This is sometimes called list directed read/write.
read (*,*) list-of-variables
write(*,*) list-of-variables

The first statement will read values from the standard input and assign the values to the variables in the variable
list, while the second one writes to the standard output.

Examples

Here is a code segment from a Fortran program:

integer m, n
real x, y, z(10)

read(*,*) m, n
read(*,*) x, y
read(*,*) z

We give the input through standard input (possibly through a data file directed to standard input). A data file
consists of records according to traditional Fortran terminology. In our example, each record contains a number
(either integer or real). Records are separated by either blanks or commas. Hence a legal input to the program
above would be:
-1 100
-1.0 1e+2
1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 5.0 6.0 7.0 8.0 9.0 10.0

Or, we could add commas as separators:

-1, 100
-1.0, 1e+2
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0

Note that Fortran 77 input is line sensitive, so it is important not to have extra input elements (fields) on a line
(record). For example, if we gave the first four inputs all on one line as
-1, 100, -1.0, 1e+2
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0

then m and n would be assigned the values -1 and 100 respectively, but the last two values would be discarded, x
and y would be assigned the values 1.0 and 2.0, ignoring the rest of the second line. This would leave the elements
of z all undefined.

If there are too few inputs on a line then the next line will be read. For example
-1
100
-1.0
1e+2
1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0

30
would produce the same results as the first two examples.

Other versions

For simple list-directed I/O it is possible to use the alternate syntax

read *, list-of-variables
print *, list-of-variables

which has the same meaning as the list-directed read and write statements described earlier. This version always
reads/writes to standard input/output so the * corresponds to the format.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

31
17. Format statements
So far we have mostly used free format input/output. This uses a set of default rules for how to input and output
values of different types (integers, reals, characters, etc.). Often the programmer wants to specify some particular
input or output format, e.g., how many decimals places in real numbers. For this purpose Fortran 77 has the format
statement. The same format statements are used for both input and output.

Syntax
write(*, label) list-of-variables
label format format-code

A simple example demonstrates how this works. Say you have an integer variable you want to print in a field 4
characters wide and a real number you want to print in fixed point notation with 3 decimal places.

write(*, 900) i, x
900 format (I4,F8.3)

The format label 900 is chosen somewhat arbitrarily, but it is common practice to number format statements with
higher numbers than the control flow labels. After the keyword format follows the format codes enclosed in
parenthesis. The code I4 stands for an integer with width four, while F8.3 means that the number should be printed
using fixed point notation with field width 8 and 3 decimal places.

The format statement may be located anywhere within the program unit. There are two programming styles: Either
the format statement follows directly after the read/write statement, or all the format statements are grouped
together at the end of the (sub-)program.

Common format codes

The most common format code letters are:

A - text string
D - double precision numbers, exponent notation
E - real numbers, exponent notation
F - real numbers, fixed point format
I - integer
X - horizontal skip (space)
/ - vertical skip (newline)

The format code F (and similarly D, E) has the general form Fw.d where w is an integer constant denoting the field
width and d is an integer constant denoting the number of significant digits.

For integers only the field width is specified, so the syntax is Iw. Similarly, character strings can be specified as Aw
but the field width is often dropped.

If a number or string does not fill up the entire field width, spaces will be added. Usually the text will be adjusted
to the right, but the exact rules vary among the different format codes.

For horizontal spacing, the nX code is often used. This means n horizontal spaces. If n is omitted, n=1 is assumed.
For vertical spacing (newlines), use the code /. Each slash corresponds to one newline. Note that each read or
write statement by default ends with a newline (here Fortran differs from C).

Some examples

This piece of Fortran code

x = 0.025
write(*,100) 'x=', x
100 format (A,F)
write(*,110) 'x=', x
110 format (A,F5.3)
write(*,120) 'x=', x
120 format (A,E)
write(*,130) 'x=', x
130 format (A,E8.1)

32
produces the following output when we run it:
x= 0.0250000
x=0.025
x= 0.2500000E-01
x= 0.3E-01

Note how blanks are automatically padded on the left and that the default field width for real numbers is usually
14. We see that Fortran 77 follows the rounding rule that digits 0-4 are rounded downwards while 5-9 are rounded
upwards.

In this example each write statement used a different format statement. But it is perfectly fine to use the same
format statement for many different write statements. In fact, this is one of the main advantages of using format
statements. This feature is handy when you print tables for instance, and want each row to have the same format.

Format strings in read/write statements

Instead of specifying the format code in a separate format statement, one can give the format code in the
read/write statement directly. For example, the statement

write (*,'(A, F8.3)') 'The answer is x = ', x

is equivalent to

write (*,990) 'The answer is x = ', x

990 format (A, F8.3)

Sometimes text strings are given in the format statements, e.g. the following version is also equivalent:

write (*,999) x
999 format ('The answer is x = ', F8.3)

Implicit loops and repeat counts

Now let us do a more complicated example. Say you have a two-dimensional array of integers and want to print the
upper left 5 by 10 submatrix with 10 values each on 5 rows. Here is how:
do 10 i = 1, 5
write(*,1000) (a(i,j), j=1,10)
10 continue
1000 format (I6)

We have an explicit do loop over the rows and an implicit loop over the column index j.

Often a format statement involves repetition, for example

950 format (2X, I3, 2X, I3, 2X, I3, 2X, I3)

There is a shorthand notation for this:

950 format (4(2X, I3))

It is also possible to allow repetition without explicitly stating how many times the format should be repeated.
Suppose you have a vector where you want to print the first 50 elements, with ten elements on each line. Here is
one way:
write(*,1010) (x(i), i=1,50)
1010 format (10I6)

The format statement says ten numbers should be printed. But in the write statement we try to print 50 numbers.
So after the ten first numbers have been printed, the same format statement is automatically used for the next ten
numbers and so on.

Implicit do-loops can be multi-dimensional and can be used to make an read or write statement difficult to
understand. You should avoid using implicit loops which are much more complicated than the ones shown here.

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Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

34
18. Numerical Software
Most computational problems in engineering can be broken down into well-known types of calculations, e.g.,
solving linear systems of equations, computing fast Fourier transforms, etc. Furthermore, software to solve these
subtasks is often already available. Consequently, you only have to write a short driver routine for your particular
problem. This way people don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

The best software for a particular type of problem must often be purchased from a commercial company, but for
linear algebra and some other basic numerical computations there is high-quality free software available (through
Netlib).

Netlib

Netlib (the NET LIBrary) is a large collection of freely available software, documents, and databases of interest to
the numerical, scientific computing, and other communities. The repository is maintained by AT&T Bell
Laboratories, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and replicated at several sites
around the world.

Netlib contains high-quality software that has been extensively tested, but (as all free software) it comes with no
warranty and little (if any) support. In order to use the software, you first have to download it to your computer and
then compile it yourself.

There are many ways to access Netlib. The most common methods are the World Wide Web, e-mail, and ftp:

World Wide Web (WWW)

[Link]
e-mail
Send the message:
send index

to

netlib@[Link]

to receive a contents summary and instructions.

ftp
Anonymous ftp to:
[Link]

Two of the most popular packages at Netlib are the BLAS and LAPACK libraries which we will describe in later
sections.

Some commercial Fortran packages

In this section we briefly mention a few of the largest (commercial) software packages for general numerical
computations.

NAG
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) has developed a Fortran library containing over 1000 user-callable
subroutines for solving general applied math problems, including: ordinary and partial differential equations,
optimization problems, FFT and other transforms, quadrature, linear algebra, non-linear equations, integral
equations, and more.
IMSL
The IMSL Fortran numerical library is made by Visual Numerics, Inc. and covers most of the areas contained
in the NAG library. It also has support for analyzing and presenting statistical data in scientific and business
applications.
Numerical recipes
The books Numerical Recipes in C/Fortran are very popular among engineers because they can be used as a
cookbooks where you can find a "recipe" to solve the problem at hand. However, the corresponding software
Numerical Recipes is in no way (e.g. scope or quality) comparable to that provided by NAG or IMSL.

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It should be mentioned that all the software listed above also comes in a C version (or is at least callable from C).

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

36
19. Fortran programming style
There are many different programming styles, but here are some general guidelines that are fairly
non-controversial.

Portability

To ensure portability, use only standard Fortran 77. The only exception we have allowed in this tutorial is to use
lower case letters.

Program structure

The overall program structure should be modular. Each subprogram should solve a well-defined task. Many people
prefer to write each subprogram in a separate file.

Comments

Write legible code, but also add comments in the source explaining what is happening! It is especially important to
have a good header for each subprogram that explains each input/output argument and what the subprogram does.

Indentation

Always use proper indentation for loops and if blocks as demonstrated in this tutorial.

Variables

Always declare all variables. Implicit type declaration is bad! Try to stick to maximum 6 characters for variable
names, or at the very least make sure the 6 first characters are unique.

Subprograms

Never let functions have "side effects", i.e. do not change the value of the input parameters. Use subroutines in
such cases.

In the declarations, separate parameters, common blocks, and local variables.

Minimize the use of common blocks.

Goto

Minimize the use of goto. Unfortunately it is necessary to use goto in some loops since while is not standard
Fortran.

Arrays

In many cases it is best to declare all large arrays in the main program and then pass them as arguments to the
various subroutines. This way all the space allocation is done in one place. Remember to pass the leading
dimensions. Avoid unnecessary "reshaping" of matrices.

Efficiency concerns

When you have a double loop accessing a two-dimensional array, it is usually best to have the first (row) index in
the innermost loop. This is because of the storage scheme in Fortran.

When you have if-then-elseif statements with multiple conditions, try to place the most likely conditions first.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

37
20. Debugging hints
It has been estimated that about 90% of the time it takes to develop commercial software is spent debugging and
testing. This shows how important it is to write good code in the first place.

Still, we all discover bugs from time to time. Here are some hints for how to track them down.

Useful compiler options

Most Fortran compilers will have a set of options you can turn on if you like. The following compiler options are
specific to the Sun Fortran 77 compiler, but most compilers will have similar options (although the letters may be
different).

-ansi
This will warn you about all non-standard Fortran 77 extensions in your program.
-u
This will override the implicit type rules and make all variables undeclared initially. If your compiler does not
have such an option, you can achieve almost the same thing by adding the declaration
implicit none (a-z)

in the beginning of each (sub-)program.

-C
Check for array bounds. The compiler will try to detect if you access array elements that are out of bounds. It
cannot catch all such errors, however.

Some common errors

Here are some common errors to watch out for:

Make sure your lines end at column 72. The rest will be ignored!
Do your parameter lists in the calling and the called program match?
Do your common blocks match?
Have you done integer division when you wanted real division?
Have you typed an o when you meant 0, an l when you meant 1?

Debugging tools

If you have a bug, you have to try to locate it. Syntax errors are easy to find. The problem is when you have
run-time errors. The old-fashioned way to find errors is to add write statements in your code and try to track the
values of your variables. This is a bit tedious since you have to recompile your source code every time you change
the program slightly. Today one can use special debuggers which is a convenient tool. You can step through a
program line by line or define your own break points, you can display the values of the variables you want to
monitor, and much more. Most UNIX machines will have the debuggers dbx and gdb. Unfortunately, these are
difficult to learn since they have an old-fashioned line-oriented user interface. Check if there is a graphical user
interface available, like, e.g., xdbx or dbxtool.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

38
21. Fortran resources on the Web
Fortran FAQ
The Fortran Market
Fortran Standards Documents
Fortran books
Fortran 90 Information
Tutorial: Fortran 90 for the Fortran 77 Programmer.

Copyright © 1995-7 by Stanford University. All rights reserved.

39