Preface

This file contains the full text of Professional Programmer's Guide to Fortran77 published by Pitman in 1988. Since the book went out of print in 1994, it seemed reasonable to make the text available free of charge over the Internet. Fortran77 is, of course, technically obsolete, since the ISO Standard for Fortran90 has replaced it. Many programmers are likely to continue using Fortran77, however, until Fortran90 compilers become much more widely available.

I am retaining all rights to this text, except that it may be copied and reproduced without fee, provided that the attribution to the author is preserved.

This file is written in LaTeXand is called prof77.tex: it is substantially the same as the published version but the opportunity has been taken to correct a few mistakes and make some minor updates.

In order to keep the price down, the book was deliberately kept rather shorter than the average Fortran textbook, but it still covered the entire Fortran77 language as defined in the ANSI and ISO Standards. I also managed to include several topics which are often omitted from much larger textbooks because they are deemed to be too "advanced".

I also wanted to encourage the writing of clear, reliable, portable, robust, and well structured code, so short sections appear throughout the book offering guidance on the practical use of Fortran. Various obsolete or superfluous features of the language, mainly those which have been retained for compatibility with earlier versions of Fortran, are omitted from the main text but are covered in the section 13. This is provided solely for the assistance of those who inherit elderly software.