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The Fortran Character Set

  The only characters needed to write Fortran programs, and the only ones that should be used in portable software, are those in the Fortran character set:

 
Figure: Compiling and Linking
the 26 upper-case letters A B C ... X Y Z
the 10 digits 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
and 13 special characters:  

+ plus - minus
* asterisk / slash
blank = equals
( left parenthesis ) right parenthesis
. decimal point , comma
' apostrophe : colon
$ currency symbol    
Although this character set is somewhat limited, it is at least universally available, which helps to make programs portable. What suffers is program legibility: lower-case letters are absent and it is necessary to resort to ugly constructions like .LT. and .GT. to represent operators like < and >. Some of the special characters, such as the asterisk and parentheses, are also rather overloaded with duties.



 
next up previous contents index
Next: Blanks Up: Program Structure and Layout Previous: Program Structure and Layout
Helen Rowlands
8/27/1998