10.2.1. Overview


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Fortran 90 is the current international Fortran standard. MPI-2 Fortran bindings are Fortran 90 bindings that in most cases are ``Fortran 77 friendly.'' That is, with few exceptions (e.g., KIND-parameterized types, and the mpi module, both of which can be avoided) Fortran 77 compilers should be able to compile MPI programs.


[] 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 . A third level of Fortran support is envisioned, but is deferred to future standardization efforts. In the rest of this section, ``Fortran'' shall refer to Fortran 90 (or its successor) 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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MPI-2.0 of July 18, 1997
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