Emulating namespaces in Fortran 90

Question

One of the most troublesome issues with Fortran 90 is the lack of namespacing. In this previous question \"How do you use Fortran 90 module data\" from Pete, it has been dis

Answer 1

Having several years of Fortran-only programming experience (I got into Python only a year ago), I was not aware of such concept as namespaces for a while. So I guess I learned to just keep track of everything imported, and as High Performance Mark said, use ONLY as much as you have time to do it (tedious).

Another way I can think of to emulate a namespace would be to declare everything within a module as a derived type component. Fortran won't let you name the module the same way as the namespace, but prefixing module_ to module name could be intuitive enough:

MODULE module_constants
IMPLICIT NONE

TYPE constants_namespace
  REAL :: pi=3.14159
  REAL ::  e=2.71828
ENDTYPE

TYPE(constants_namespace) :: constants

ENDMODULE module_constants


PROGRAM namespaces
USE module_constants
IMPLICIT NONE

WRITE(*,*)constants%pi
WRITE(*,*)constants%e

ENDPROGRAM namespaces