A Dialect of Modern Fortran for Computer Simulations

Abstract

The modern Fortran is one of the major languages in computational sciences. New features introduced in Fortran 2003 and later have improved the writing experiences of simulation programming. Some features of the language, however, can be further improved by slightly modifying its lexical syntax and imposing a coding rule. In this paper, we propose a dialect of the modern Fortran for the improvements. The features of the dialect include; the period “.” as the member access operator; block comments, addition/subtraction/multiplication assignment, pre-defined and user-defined aliases, automatic check of “implicit none” call, “just once” block, and “skip” block. We have developed a preprocessor to convert the dialect into the legitimate Fortran. It is a simple text converter that keeps the line numbers of the input dialect and the output standard codes.