Source Form

GNU Fortran accepts programs written in either fixed form or free form.

Fixed form corresponds to ANSI FORTRAN 77 (plus popular extensions, such as allowing tabs) and Fortran 90's fixed form.

Free form corresponds to Fortran 90's free form (though possibly not entirely up-to-date, and without complaining about some things that for which Fortran 90 requires diagnostics, such as the spaces in the constant in `R = 3 . 1').

The way a Fortran compiler views source files depends entirely on the implementation choices made for the compiler, since those choices are explicitly left to the implementation by the published Fortran standards. GNU Fortran currently tries to be somewhat like a few popular compilers (f2c, Digital ("DEC") Fortran, and so on), though a cleaner default definition along with more flexibility offered by command-line options is likely to be offered in version 0.6.

This section describes how g77 interprets source lines.

• Carriage Returns: Carriage returns ignored.
• Tabs: Tabs converted to spaces.
• Short Lines: Short lines padded with spaces (fixed-form only).
• Long Lines: Long lines truncated.
• Ampersands: Special Continuation Lines.

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