Getting Ready

Abstract

This tutorial presents a description of Fortran 90 tailored to meet the needs of a reader who feels reasonably comfortable developing programs using any of the popular implementations of Fortran available in the late 1980s or early 1990s, that is, a reader who already has a working knowledge of arrays, DO loops, subroutines, CHARACTER variables, and simple I/O. The discussion here focuses on those Fortran 90 features that were not generally available in earlier versions of the language, although occasionally some of the less popular traditional features will be described briefly. But before beginning a methodical presentation of the new features, which will occupy Chapters 2 through 14 of the tutorial, this first chapter will prepare the way by introducing some fundamental terminology, showing how some of the most important of the new features look and feel, and describing a few conventions that will be used throughout the tutorial. The heart of the tutorial is made up of approximately 150 complete Fortran 90 programs, all of which can be compiled and executed, and this approach is established in this chapter by the presentation of the first 9 of these programs.