Preface

This guide combines the essential information programmers need to develop efficient applications using the two Sun^TM Fortran compilers, f77 (Fortran 77 Release 4.2) and f90 (Fortran 90 Release 1.2). It deals primarily with issues relating to input/output, program development, use and creation of software libraries, program analysis and debugging, numerical accuracy, porting, performance, optimization, parallelization, and the C/Fortran interface.

Discussion of the compiler command-line options and their use can be found in the companion book, Sun Fortran User's Guide.

Note - This guide covers the Sun Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 compilers. The text uses "f77/f90" and "Fortran" to indicate information that is common to both compilers.

Audience

This guide is intended for scientists, engineers, and programmers who have a working knowledge of the Fortran language and wish to learn how to use the Sun Fortran compilers effectively. Familiarity with the Solaris^TM operating system or UNIX® in general is also assumed.

Organization of This Guide

This guide is organized into the following chapters and appendixes:

Chapter 1, "Introduction," briefly describes the features of the compilers.
Chapter 2, "Fortran Input/Output," discusses how to use I/O efficiently.
Chapter 3, "Program Development," demonstrates how program management tools like SCCS, make, and Teamware can be helpful.
Chapter 4, "Libraries," explains use and creation of software libraries.
Chapter 5, "Program Analysis and Debugging," describes use of dbx and other analysis tools.
Chapter 6, "Floating Point Arithmetic," introduces important issues regarding numerical computation accuracy.
Chapter 7, "Porting," considers porting programs to Sun compilers.
Chapter 8, "Performance Profiling," describes techniques for performance measurement.
Chapter 9, "Performance and Optimization," indicates ways to improve execution performance of Fortran programs.
Chapter 10, "Parallelization," explains the multiprocessing features of the compilers.
Chapter 11, "C-Fortran Interface," describes how C and Fortran routines can call each other and pass data.

Multiplatform Release

The Sun Fortran documentation covers the release of the Fortran compilers on a number of operating systems and hardware platforms:

Fortran 77 4.2 is released for:

Solaris 2.x operating system on:

Fortran 90 1.2 is released for:

Solaris 2.x operating system on SPARC architectures only.

The Fortran documentation describes the Sun compilers on all the above operating systems and platforms. Issues unique to one or more platforms is identified as "(SPARC)", "(Intel)", "(PowerPC)".

Conventions in Text

This manual uses the following conventions to display information.

Code listings and examples appear in boxes:
WRITE( *, * ) 'Hello world'
The plain Courier font shows prompts, coding, and generally anything that is computer output.
In dialogs, the boldface Courier font shows text you type in:
demo% echo hello

hello

demo%
Italics indicate general arguments or parameters that you replace with the appropriate input. Italics also indicate emphasis.
The small clear triangle shows a blank space where that is significant:
36.001
Fortran 77 examples appear in tab format, while Fortran 90 examples appear in free format. Examples common to both Fortran 77 and 90 use tab format except where indicated.
Uppercase characters are generally used to show Fortran keywords and intrinsics (PRINT), and lowercase or mixed case is used for variables (TbarX).
The Sun Fortran compilers are referred to by their command names, either f77 or f90. "f77/f90" indicates information that is common to both the Fortran 77 and Fortran 90 compilers.
References to online man pages appear with the topic name and section number. For example, a reference to GETENV will appear as getenv(3F), implying that the man command to access this page would be:

man -s 3F getenv