The new features of Fortran 2008

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to summarize the new features of the draft Fortran 2008 standard (ISO/IEC 2008). We take as our starting point Fortran 2003 (ISO/IEC 2008). An official extension for enhanced module facilities (ISO/IEC 2005) that has been published as a Type 2 Technical Report (TR), and WG5 is committed to include this in Fortran 2008. For an informal description of Fortran 2003 and Enhanced Module Facilities see Metcalf, Reid, and Cohen (2004). The major proposed extension consists of coarrays for parallel computing. Since the author has already summarised coarrays in another WG5 paper (Reid 2008), we refer the reader to this for further details. This is not an official document and has not been approved by either of the Fortran committees WG5 or J3.