Writing robust and “modern” Fortran code

Question

In some scientific environments, you often cannot go without FORTRAN as most of the developers only know that idiom, and there is lot of legacy code and related experience.

Answer 1

Fortran 90/95/2003 is designed so that one can write modular code, if one wants to, via addition of modules, private/public, user defined types, etc. Fortran 2003 introduces further object oriented features. It makes no sense to connect to C to add malloc when Fortran 90 has "allocate" to directly dynamically allocate Fortran arrays in a safer way. Placing your procedures (functions and subroutines) in modules and then "using" the modules will cause the interfaces to be checked. One can use the many debug / checking options of the compilers, such as subscript bounds checking.

An excellent book to learn about these and other features: "Fortran 95/2003 Explained" by Metcalf, Reid and Cohen. It is definitely a good idea to learn the best features of modern Fortran rather than continuing to write FORTRAN 77 -- if necessary, write coding standards / guide.