Many Fortran programmers do not know where to start with Fortran 90. What is new about the language? How can it help them? How does a programmer with old habits learn new strategies?

This book is a practical guide to Fortran 90 for the current Fortran programmer. It provides a complete overview of the new features that Fortran 90 has brought to the Fortran standard, with examples and suggestions for use. The book discusses older ways of solving problems--both in FORTRAN 77 and in common tricks or extensions-- and contrasts them with the new ways provided by Fortran 90.

The book has a practical focus, with the goal of getting the current Fortran programmer up to speed quickly. Two dozen examples of full programs are interspersed within the text, which includes over 4,000 lines of working code.

Chapters cover the following topics:

Aggregate array operations and array sections.

Derived types (structures).

Subroutines and functions revisited.

Overloaded operators and assignment statements.

Modules.

Allocatable arrays and pointers.

Improvements in file handling.

Numeric precision (KIND and numeric intrinsics).

Bit manipulation.

New intrinsic functions.