Tsoding on Fortran

Line length raising in the future and “currently available (via compiler flags)” is a terrible state when compared to almost anything else someone might use today.

Also, one should expect that people googling for answers are looking for single sentence at most + block of code self contained working example to copy/paste into their work. It is ridiculous to expect people to read paragraphs of text mixed with historical (irrelevant) information and standards language when searching for simple things.

Gfortran’s list of intrinsic procedures is quite good, but I share the same frustration that statements are not included there. I know, I know, they’re statements not procedures so obviously they don’t belong with the same list… Or, we could be pragmatic and put the “intrinsic things the language provides” all together, searchable, all optional arguments explained, with working examples for each use case. Personally I currently use gfortran as a reference for intrinsic procedures and intel’s documentation for open/read/write statements, because they have all the options in a nice table on a single page.

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Tutorials still should include in depth explanations, historical information etc. but there should be a short summary section at the very top, with exactly the things you described.

At the beginning of every Fortran tutorial there should be a short overview over the relevant building blocks in Fortran, including an explanation on functions (which appear on the rhs), subroutines (which are called with call) and statements (which are called without call and are always intrinsic).