Introduction to intrinsic procedures

The intrinsic procedures provided by GNU Fortran include procedures required by the Fortran 95 and later supported standards, and a set of intrinsic procedures for backwards compatibility with G77. Any conflict between a description here and a description in the Fortran standards is unintentional, and the standard(s) should be considered authoritative.

The enumeration of the KIND type parameter is processor defined in the Fortran 95 standard. GNU Fortran defines the default integer type and default real type by INTEGER(KIND=4) and REAL(KIND=4), respectively. The standard mandates that both data types shall have another kind, which have more precision. On typical target architectures supported by gfortran, this kind type parameter is KIND=8. Hence, REAL(KIND=8) and DOUBLE PRECISION are equivalent. In the description of generic intrinsic procedures, the kind type parameter will be specified by KIND=*, and in the description of specific names for an intrinsic procedure the kind type parameter will be explicitly given (e.g., REAL(KIND=4) or REAL(KIND=8)). Finally, for brevity the optional KIND= syntax will be omitted.

Many of the intrinsic procedures take one or more optional arguments. This document follows the convention used in the Fortran 95 standard, and denotes such arguments by square brackets.

GNU Fortran offers the -std= command-line option, which can be used to restrict the set of intrinsic procedures to a given standard. By default, gfortran sets the -std=gnu option, and so all intrinsic procedures described here are accepted. There is one caveat. For a select group of intrinsic procedures, g77 implemented both a function and a subroutine. Both classes have been implemented in gfortran for backwards compatibility with g77. It is noted here that these functions and subroutines cannot be intermixed in a given subprogram. In the descriptions that follow, the applicable standard for each intrinsic procedure is noted.