+---------------------------------Fortran 95---------------------------------+
The Fortran 95 language standard contains most features that were part of both the Fortran 90 and FORTRAN 77 language standards. However, Fortran 95 has removed a few features that were part of both the Fortran 90 and FORTRAN 77 language standards. See Deleted Features for more information. The main improvements offered by the Fortran 95 standard are:
Fortran 95 provides an efficient alternative to the element by element construction of an array value in Fortran 90. The FORALL statement allows you to explicitly specify array elements, array sections, character substrings, or pointer targets as a function of the element subscripts.
See FORALL for more information.
Fortran 95 functions may have side effects. Side effects that may occur include a change in value of an argument or global variable. To avoid problems associated with side effects, Fortran 95 enables you to specify a function as side effect free. These functions are referred to as PURE functions. A restricted form of a PURE procedure is called ELEMENTAL.
See Pure Procedures for more information.
Fortran 95 provides an efficient alternative to the problem of providing a procedure that operates elementally. In Fortran 90, to provide a procedure that operated elementally you had to produce eight versions of the procedure: one to operate on scalars, and one for each rank of the array from one to seven. If you used two array arguments as many as sixteen versions could be required. Using ELEMENTAL, you can write a single procedure with the same functionality.
See Elemental Procedures for more information.
Fortran 95 provides an improvement over Fortran 90 in that it provides a means of defining the initial pointer association status of a pointer. Fortran 95 provides an initial pointer association status other than undefined through the use of the NULL intrinsic function.
See NULL(MOLD) for more information.
In addition, Fortran 95 provides a means of specifying default initial values for derived-type components which enhances Fortran's data abstraction capabilities.
See Derived Types for more information.
Fortran 95 provides an improvement over Fortran 90 in that it allows user defined functions in specification expressions. The specification functions have a requirement that they be pure. This prevents them from having side affects that could affect other objects being declared in the same specification_part.
See Specification Expressions for more information.
Fortran 95 has removed a few features that were part of both the Fortran 90 and FORTRAN 77 language standards. The features that have been removed from the Fortran 95 standard were deemed to conform least with modern day programming practice by the Fortran standards committees. However, functionality has not been removed from Fortran 95 as efficient alternatives to the features deleted do exist.
XL Fortran continues to support the features that have been removed from the Fortran 95 standard.
See Deleted Features for more information.
+-----------------------------End of Fortran 95------------------------------+