Topic: Which version should I use? F90 or F95 or other?

If I have no need to keep compatibility with earlier fortran versions/features/limitations, is there any reason not to use the .f95 extension with my projects? It is a little confusing because I see collegiate .pdf “starter” files titled Fortran 95 but their content keeps referencing Fortran 90.

My main interest is to analyze text strings for character frequency and least squares fit to the letter frequency of other strings. In addition, I may want to create linked list data structures rather than be limited to the dimensionality of arrays.

As an aside, is there a site - here or other places - that have packaged public domain software - like code for a binary search, various sort routines, least squares measure between two arrays, etc. I can code all those things - again - but I don’t mind using something already written as long as it’s been tested.

  • jeff
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Re: Which version should I use? F90 or F95 or other?

Fortran 90 and 95 are two very similar standards.  There were some minor additions and deprecations in the 95 standard meant to clean up some "mistakes" in the original 90 standard.  They are effectively the same.

The file extensions, though, are not important.  Extensions f90, f95, f03, f08, etc. are all treated the same by the compiler.  Basically, using f90 as an extensions just means that the Fortran source code is in "free-format" syntax as opposed to files with the f or for extensions, which are in "fixed-format" syntax (the only syntax allowed in the Fortran 77 standard). 

Personally, I just always use the f90 extension.

Jeff Armstrong
Approximatrix, LLC