There are some semantic differences in the two perspectives. The cmplx() intrinsic is actually a generic type and kind conversion function that takes one, two, or three arguments which can be integer, real, or complex (with some restrictions for the mixed-type cases). There is an extra KIND= argument that can be used for nondefault KIND values, and it behaves a little quirky because when it was introduced into the language there was only one complex type.
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