Conformance

(The following information augments or overrides the information in Section 1.4 of ANSI X3.9-1978 FORTRAN 77 in specifying the GNU Fortran language. Chapter 1 of that document otherwise serves as the basis for the relevant aspects of GNU Fortran.)

The definition of the GNU Fortran language is akin to that of the ANSI FORTRAN 77 language in that it does not generally require conforming implementations to diagnose cases where programs do not conform to the language.

However, g77 as a compiler is being developed in a way that is intended to enable it to diagnose such cases in an easy-to-understand manner.

A program that conforms to the GNU Fortran language should, when compiled, linked, and executed using a properly installed g77 system, perform as described by the GNU Fortran language definition. Reasons for different behavior include, among others:

• Use of resources (memory--heap, stack, and so on; disk space; CPU time; etc.) exceeds those of the system.
• Range and/or precision of calculations required by the program exceeds that of the system.
• Excessive reliance on behaviors that are system-dependent (non-portable Fortran code).
• Bugs in the program.
• Bug in g77.
• Bugs in the system.

Despite these "loopholes", the availability of a clear specification of the language of programs submitted to g77, as this document is intended to provide, is considered an important aspect of providing a robust, clean, predictable Fortran implementation.

The definition of the GNU Fortran language, while having no special legal status, can therefore be viewed as a sort of contract, or agreement. This agreement says, in essence, "if you write a program in this language, and run it in an environment (such as a g77 system) that supports this language, the program should behave in a largely predictable way".