312. Overview


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The Fortran MPI-2 language bindings have been designed to be compatible with the Fortran 90 standard (and later). These bindings are in most cases compatible with Fortran 77, implicit-style interfaces.


Rationale. Fortran 90 contains numerous features designed to make it a more ``modern'' language than Fortran 77. It seems natural that MPI should be able to take advantage of these new features with a set of bindings tailored to Fortran 90. MPI does not (yet) use many of these features because of a number of technical difficulties. ( End of rationale.)
MPI defines two levels of Fortran support, described in Sections Basic Fortran Support and Extended Fortran Support . In the rest of this section, ``Fortran'' and ``Fortran 90'' shall refer to ``Fortran 90'' and its successors, unless qualified.

    1. Basic Fortran Support An implementation with this level of Fortran support provides the original Fortran bindings specified in MPI-1, with small additional requirements specified in Section Basic Fortran Support .
    2. Extended Fortran Support An implementation with this level of Fortran support provides Basic Fortran Support plus additional features that specifically support Fortran 90, as described in Section Extended Fortran Support .
A compliant MPI-2 implementation providing a Fortran interface must provide Extended Fortran Support unless the target compiler does not support modules or KIND-parameterized types.



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