I am a bit more familiar with that than my comment implies I suppose; going back to fortran.lang.comp. There are a few related threads here in Discourse as well, such as Why are parens required around format strings? - #3 by Carltoffel. I agree with you that is a good way to write CSV for many simple cases. Reading the line back and maintaining the read and write arguments on the I/O statements and automatically generating a CSV title line are all issues that remain; which is why modules such as GitHub - jacobwilliams/csv-fortran: Read and Write CSV Files Using Modern Fortran · GitHub exist. But you are right; for a good number of simple cases that WRITE statement will get you a far ways writing CSV although I would suggest it does not handle the issue of quoted strings on output. Between non-advancing I/O and field descriptors and list-directed and NAMELIST I/O and stream I/O , etc Fortran has a very extensive number of I/O capabilities. I think it mostly has a negative image regarding its I/O capabilities not because of a lack of capabilities but because of a lack of simple-to-use dedicated features that do nothing but some of the simple common tasks like writing a JSON/YAML/TOML/CSV file from a NAMELIST group.